Sergei Kladesev was born on Vasilyevski Island, Leningrad. He was a strange boy. While other children were making sand pies and building castles, he was drawing sections of odd-looking machines on the sand. In the second grade he built a portable machine, powered by a pocket flashlight battery, which told each pupil how many good marks he would receive during the coming week. Grown-ups considered the machine uneducational and took it away from him.
After leaving grammar school Sergei attended the Technical School for Electrochemistry. He paid no attention to the many pretty girls he met there—perhaps because he saw them every day.
One fine June day he rented a boat and sailed down the Little Neva to the Gulf of Finland. Near Volny Island he came upon a skiff with two girls in it, strangers to him. They had run onto a sandbar and, in attempting to float their boat, had broken the rudder. Sergei introduced himself and helped them back to the dock where they had rented the boat. After that he visited them frequently; the two friends lived, like Sergei, on Vasilyevski Island, Svetlana on Sixth Street, Liussia on Eleventh.
Liussia was attending a course in typewriting at the time, but Svetlana was resting up from school; secondary school had provided all the education she wanted. Besides, her well-off parents were trying to persuade her that it was time to marry; she agreed in principle, but had no intention of taking the first acceptable fellow that came along.
In the beginning Sergei preferred Liussia, but he knew how to behave toward her. She was so pretty, modest, and easily embarrassed that in her presence he too became embarrassed. Svetlana was quite different: gay and quick-witted; in short, a daredevil. Though naturally timid, Sergei felt happy when he was with her.
A year later, Sergei was visiting a friend in Roshdestwenka and there met Svetlana, who was staying with relatives. A coincidence, of course, but Sergei took it as providential. Day after day he walked in the woods and by the sea with her and was soon convinced that he could not live without her.
Svetlana did not find him especially attractive. To her he was an average fellow, and she dreamed of finding somebody unusual for her partner through life. She went walking with Sergei in the woods and by the sea only because she had to pass the time with someone.
One evening they were standing on the shore. On the smooth surface of the water there lay, like a carpet woven by nymphs, a strip of silvery moonlight. Everything was still, except for the nightingales singing in the wild elders on the opposite shore.
“How beautiful and quiet!”
“Yes, it’s pretty,” answered Svetlana. “If only we could gather some elder branches! But it’s too far for walking around on the shore. We have no boat and we can’t walk on the water!”
They returned to the village and their respective lodgings. Sergei didn’t go to bed that night. He took pencil and paper and filled page after page with formulas and drawings. In the morning he went back to the city and stayed there two days. When he returned he had a bundle under his arm.
Late that evening he took his bundle with him on their walk to the sea. At the water’s edge he opened it and took out two pairs of skates for traveling on the water.
“Here, put these water skates on,” he said. “I made them just for you.”
They both put them on and skated easily over the water to the other shore. The skates slid very nicely on the surface of the sea.
On the other shore Svetlana and Sergei broke off elder branches and then, each with a bundle, went slowly over the sea in the moonlight.
From then on they went skating every evening over the mirror-smooth surface of the water, the skates leaving behind them only a narrow, hardly visible trace, which immediately disappeared.
One day Sergei stopped out on the sea. Svetlana slowly approached him.
“Do you know something?” asked Sergei.
“No. What’s wrong?”
“Do you know, Svetlana, that I love you?”
“Of course not!” she answered ironically.
“Then you like me a little, too?”
“I can’t say that. You’re a fine fellow, but I have a different ideal of a husband. I can only love a really extraordinary man, but to tell you the truth, you’re just a good average fellow.”
“Well, you’re honest, anyway,” said a downcast Sergei.
They skated back to the shore in silence, and the next day Sergei returned to the city. For a time he felt wretched. He lost weight and wandered aimlessly through the streets. He often left the city to stroll about. In the evenings he went home to his little workroom.
One day he met Liussia walking along the river. She was glad to see him, and he noticed it immediately.
“What are you doing here, Sergei?”
“Nothing. Just walking. I’m on vacation.”
“I’m just walking, too. If you’d like, perhaps we could go over to Cultural Park.” She blushed as she made the suggestion.
They rode over to Yelagin Island and slowly walked along its avenues. Later they met several more times to stroll around the city and found that they were happy to be together.
One day Liussia came to Sergei’s house to take him off for a trip to Pavlovsk.
“What a disorganized room!” she exclaimed. “All these machines and flasks! What are they for?”
“I go in for various little inventions in my free time.”
“And I never suspected!” said Liussia in amazement. “Could you repair my typewriter? I bought it in a discount store; it’s old and the ribbon keeps getting stuck.”
“Sure, I’ll take a look at it.”
“What’s this?” she asked. “What an odd camera! I’ve never seen one like it.”
“It’s a very ordinary FED camera but it has an accessory that I built just recently. With it you can photograph the future. You aim the camera at a place whose future appearance you’d like to know, and take the picture. But my machine isn’t perfected yet. You can photograph things only three years ahead, no more than that as yet.”
“Three years! That’s a lot. What a wonderful invention!”
“Wonderful? Not at all,” said Sergei with a disdainful gesture. “It’s very imperfect.”
“Have you taken any pictures?”
“Yes. A short time ago I went out to the suburbs and shot some film there.” He took several prints from his desk.
“Here I photographed a birch in a meadow, without using the accessory. Then here is the same tree in two years’ time.”
“It’s grown a bit and has more branches.”
“And here it is three years from now.”
“But there’s nothing there!” cried the astonished Liussia. “Just a stump and next to it a pit, like a shell hole. And over there are a pair of soldiers running along stooped. What strange uniforms they’re wearing! I can’t understand the picture at all.”
“Yes, I was surprised too, when I developed the picture. It looks to me as though there are some kind of maneuvers going on there.”
“Sergei, you’d better burn that photo. It looks too like a military secret. That picture might fall into the hands of a foreign spy!”
“You’re right, Liussia. I never thought of that.” He tore up the picture and threw it into the stove with a pile of other trash; then he set fire to it.
“Now I feel better,” said Liussia, obviously relieved. “But now take my picture as I’ll be a year from now. In this chair over by the window.”
“But the accessory will only photograph a certain sector of space and whatever is in it. So, if you’re not sitting in that chair a year from now, you won’t be in the picture.”
“Take me anyway. Who knows, maybe I will be sitting in this chair this day and hour next year!”
“All right,” Sergei agreed. “I still have one picture left on this roll.” He took the picture. “Come on, I’ll develop the film immediately and make some prints. The bathroom is free today; no one is doing any wash.”
He went into the bathroom and developed the film, then brought it back to his room and hung it up near the window to dry.
Liussia took the film by the edges and peered at the last exposure. It seemed to her that someone else was in the chair. At the same time she was secretly wishing that she might be sitting there in a year’s time. It’s probably me, she concluded, only I didn’t come out too well.
Once the film was dry, they went into the bathroom, where the red light was still on. Sergei put the strip of film into the enlarger, turned the machine on, and projected the image onto photographic paper. He then quickly put the picture into the developer. On the paper the features of a woman appeared. She sat in the chair and was embroidering a large cat on a piece of cloth. The cat was almost finished, all but the tail.
“That’s not me sitting there!” Liussia was disillusioned. “It’s a different woman entirely.”
“No, it’s not you,” Sergei agreed. “I don’t know who it is; I never saw the woman before.”
“Sergei, I think I’d better be going,” said Liussia. “You needn’t stop by; I can have the typewriter repaired at the store.”
“But at least let me bring you home!”
“No, Sergei, there’s no need. I don’t want to get mixed up in this business.” She left.
My inventions bring me no luck, thought Sergei to himself. He took a hammer and smashed the accessory.
About two months later, as Sergei was walking along Bolshoi Avenue, he saw a young woman sitting on a bench and recognized her as the unknown woman of the fateful photograph.
She turned to him: “Can you tell me the time?”
Sergei told her and sat down next to her. They chatted about the weather and got acquainted. Sergei learned that her name was Tamara. He saw her often and soon married her. They had a son, whom Tamara named Alfred.
Tamara proved to be a very boring wife. Nothing roused much interest from her. Day in and day out she sat in the chair by the window and embroidered cats, swans, and stags on little strips of cloth which she then hung proudly on the wall. She didn’t love Sergei; she had married him only because he had a room of his own and because after her examinations at the Horse Trainers’ Institute she didn’t want to work in the provinces. No one had authority to send a married woman away.
Herself a boring person, she regarded Sergei too as boring, uninteresting, and insignificant. He was always spending his leisure time inventing something; she didn’t approve, and thought it a senseless waste of time. She was constantly scolding him for filling the room with his machines and apparatuses.
To get more freedom of movement in the room, Sergei built his LEAG, or Local Effect Anti-Gravitation, machine. With the aid of this machine he could do his work on the ceiling of the room. He laid flooring on the ceiling, set his desk on it, and brought up his instruments and tools. In order not to dirty the wall on which he walked up to the ceiling, he glued a narrow strip of linoleum on it. From now on the lower part of the room belonged to his wife, and the upper became his workroom.
Tamara was still dissatisfied: she was now afraid that the superintendent might find out about the expansion of the room space and demand double rent. Furthermore, it displeased her that Sergei should walk so nonchalantly along the ceiling. It just didn’t seem right.
“At least have respect for my superior education and don’t walk around that way with your head hanging down,” she cried up to him from her chair. “Other women have normal husbands, but here I am, stuck with a bird of ill omen.”
When Sergei came home from work (he worked at the Transenergy Authority as a technical control officer), he ate quickly and went off up the wall to his preserve. He frequently went for walks through the city and its environs so as not to have to listen to Tamara’s constant nagging. He became so used to hiking that he could have walked to Pavlovsk with no difficulty.
One day he met Svetlana at the corner of Eighth Street and Sredni Avenue.
“I’ve married an extraordinary man since we last met,” were her opening words. “My Petya is a real inventor. He’s working just now as a beginning inventor at the Everything Everyday Research Institute, but he’ll soon be promoted to the intermediate class. Petya has already invented something all by himself: Don’t Steal soap.”
“What kind of soap is that?” asked Sergei.
“The idea behind it is quite simple—but then every work of genius is simple, of course. Don’t Steal is an ordinary toilet soap, but its core is a piece of solidified, water-resistant, black India ink. If someone, let’s say your neighbor in the community house, steals the soap and washes with it, he dirties himself physically as well as morally.”
“And if the soap isn’t stolen?”
“Don’t ask silly questions!” Svetlana flashed back angrily at him “You’re just jealous of Petya!”
“Do you ever see Liussia? How is she getting along?”
“Oh, she’s the same as ever. I keep telling her to look for a suitable extraordinary man and marry him, but she says nothing. She seems bent on becoming an old maid.”
Soon afterward the war began. Tamara and Alfred were evacuated; Sergei went to the front. He began the war as a second lieutenant of infantry and ended as a first lieutenant. He returned to Leningrad, exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes, and went back to his old work at the Transenergy Authority. Shortly afterward, Tamara and Alfred also returned, and life went on as before.
Years passed.
Alfred grew up, finished school, and went through the minimal course requirements for the training of hotel personnel. Then he went south and got a job in a hotel.
Tamara continued to embroider cats, swans, and stags on wall hangings. She had grown duller and more quarrelsome with the years. She had also made the acquaintance of a retired director, a bachelor, and was constantly threatening Sergei that, if he didn’t finally come to his senses and give up inventing things, she would leave him and go off with the director.
Svetlana was still quite satisfied with her Petya. Yes, he was going places. He’d been promoted to intermediate inventor and had now invented four-sided wheel spokes to replace the old-fashioned round ones! She could really be proud of him.
Liussia still lived on Vasilyevski Island and worked as a secretary in the office of Klavers, which designed and built replacement parts for pianos. She hadn’t married and often thought of Sergei. She’d seen him once from a distance but hadn’t approached him. He was walking with his wife along Seventh Street on his way to the Baltika Cinema; Liussia immediately recognized his wife as the woman in the photograph.
Sergei thought often of Liussia, too; he tried to distract himself by concentrating on new inventions. The things he made never seemed to him quite perfect and therefore he thought he had no right to get involved with more difficult ones. Recently he had invented a Quarrel Measurer and Ender and installed it in the kitchen of the community house where he lived. The apparatus had a scale with twenty divisions, which measured the mood of the lodger and the intensity of a quarrel that might be going on. The needle trembled at the first unfriendly word and slowly approached the red line. If it reached the line, the Quarrel Ender went into action. Soft, soothing music filled the room; an automatic atomizer emitted a cloud of valerian and White Night perfume; and on the screen of the machine appeared a fellow who leaped about in a comical way, bowed low to the viewers, and kept repeating: “Be at peace with one another, citizens!”
Due to the machine people would make up in the early stages of a quarrel, and all the lodgers in the house were quite grateful to Sergei for his modest invention.
Sergei had also invented a telescope by making a windowpane with the properties of a gigantic magnifying glass. Through this window of his room he could see the canals of Mars, the craters of the moon, and the storms of Venus. When Tamara got on his nerves too much, he distracted and soothed himself by gazing out into distant worlds.
Most of his inventions had no practical value. But one did save him the expense of buying matches. He had succeeded in extracting benzene from water, and, since he smoked a good deal, he now lit his cigarettes from a lighter filled with his own benzene. Otherwise he led a rather joyless life. Neither Tamara nor Alfred brought him any happiness. When Alfred visited Leningrad, he talked mainly with Tamara.
“How are you getting along?” he asked her.
“What do you expect?” she answered him with a question. “My only pleasure is my art. Look at this stag that I’m embroidering!”
“What a splendid animal!” cried Alfred. “It’s so lifelike! And the antlers! If I had antlers like that, I’d really get somewhere.”
“Your father has no feeling for art. He’s only interested in inventing things. But there’s hardly any use to what he makes!”
“Well, at least he doesn’t drink; you ought to be grateful for that,” was her son’s encouraging answer. “He’s a slow comer but maybe he’ll wise up a bit. When I look at the people who stop at the hotel, I’m ashamed of Father. One guest is a head buyer, another is a foreigner, another a scientific correspondent. A short time ago a lecturer who wrote Pushkin’s autobiography was living in one of our apartments. He owns a country cottage and an automobile.”
“How can I dream of a country cottage with a husband like mine?” Tamara asked dejectedly. “I’ve had enough of him. I’d like to get a divorce.”
“Have you hooked anyone else yet?”
“I know a retired director, a bachelor. He has an eye for art! I made him a gift of an embroidered swan, and he was as happy as a child over it. With someone like that you can come out on top.”
“What was he director of? A hotel?”
“He was a cemetery director, and he’s a serious man.”
“He’d have to be, in that job,” agreed her son.
One June evening Sergei was up on the ceiling working on a new invention. He didn’t notice the time passing, and it grew quite late. He went to bed but forgot to set the alarm, and he overslept the next morning, so that he couldn’t get to work on time. He decided not to go in at all that day: it was the first and last time that he stayed away from work.
“You’re going to the dogs with your inventions,” said Tamara. “At least you could have missed work for something worthwhile! But this stuff! Clever people earn a bit extra on the side, but you produce nothing, no more than a he-goat gives milk.”
“Don’t be angry, Tamara,” Sergei said, trying to calm her. “Everything will turn out all right. It’ll soon be vacation and we’ll take a boat ride on the Volga.”
“I don’t need your cheap boat rides,” Tamara screamed. “You ought to take a ride behind your own back and listen to what people say about you. They all consider you a fool and laugh at you.”
She snatched an unfinished wall hanging from its hook and stormed out in a rage.
Sergei was thoughtful. He reflected for a long time and then decided to take a ride behind his own back as his wife had suggested. Some time earlier, he had invented an Invisible Presence Machine (IPM), which was effective up to a distance of thirty-five miles. But he had never used the IPM to observe life in the city, thinking it unethical to look into people’s homes or to pry into their private lives. Instead, he often set the machine for the woods on the city’s outskirts and watched the birds building their nests or listened to their songs.
Now, however, he decided to test the IPM within the city. He turned it on, set the knob at a very close range, and turned the directional antenna toward the kitchen of the community house. Two women were standing at the gas stove, gossiping about this and that. Finally, one of them said; “Tamara’s off to the director’s again—and not the least bit embarrassed!”
“I’m sorry for Sergei Vladimirovich,” answered the other. “What a good and clever man—and this woman is destroying him!”
“I have to agree with you,” he could hear the first woman say. “He really does seem to be a good and clever man, but he has no luck.”
Sergei next spied on his fellow workers, and they too had nothing but good to say about him. He turned off the IPM and thought for a while. Then Liussia came to mind and he felt a strong desire to see her again, if only for a moment. He turned the machine on and searched for Liussia’s room on the fifth floor of a house on Eleventh Street. Perhaps she no longer lived there? Perhaps she had gotten married and moved away? Or just changed to another floor in the same building?
Unfamiliar rooms and unknown people flashed on the screen. Finally he found Liussia’s place. She wasn’t there but it was certainly her room. The furniture was the same, and the same picture hung on the wall as before. On a small table stood her typewriter. Liussia was probably at work.
He next aimed the IPM at Svetlana’s house, wondering how she was getting along. He found her rather easily in a house stuffed full of all sorts of brand-new things; she herself had aged a bit but seemed cheerful and content.
Suddenly her bell rang and she went to open the door. “Hello, Liussia! I haven’t seen you for a long time!” she claimed in a welcoming tone.
“I just happened by; it’s our midday break,” said Liussia, and Sergei too could now see her. Over the years she hadn’t grown any younger, but she was just as attractive as ever.
The two friends went into the house and chatted about all sorts of things.
“Aren’t you ever going to get married?” Svetlana suddenly asked. “You can still get some worthwhile man in his prime.”
“I don’t want one,” said Liussia dejectedly. “The man I like is long since married.”
“Are you still in love with Sergei?” Svetlana persisted. “What do you see in him? What’s so great about him? He’s the kind that never amounts to much. He was a nice young fellow, of course. Once he gave me water skates, and we used to skate together across the water. The nightingales were singing on the shore and the people were snoring in their cottages, but we flew across the sea and showed our skill.”
“I never knew he invented anything like that,” Liussia said thoughtfully. “Did you keep them?”
“Of course not! Petya took them to the junk dealer long ago. He said the whole idea was nonsense. Petya is a real inventor and knows what’s what with inventions!”
“Is Petya’s job going well?”
“Excellent! A short time ago he invented MUCO-1.”
“What’s a MUCO?”
“A Mechanical Universal Can Opener. Now housewives and bachelors will be spared all the trouble they used to go to in opening cans.”
“Have you got one?” Liussia wanted to pursue the matter. “I’d like to see it.”
“No, I haven’t and never will. It’s to weigh five tons and will require a cement platform. Besides, it will cost four hundred thousand rubles.”
“What housewife can afford one, then?” Liussia was amazed.
“My, you’re slow!” said Svetlana impatiently. “Every housewife won’t be buying one. One will be enough for a whole city. It’ll be set up in the center of town—on Nevski Prospekt, for example. There they’ll build the UCCOC—United City Can Opening Center. It will be very handy. Suppose you have visitors and want to open some sardines for them; you don’t need a tool for opening the can and you don’t have to do a lot of work. You just take your can to UCCOC, hand it in at the reception desk, pay five kopeks, and get a receipt. At the desk they paste a ticket on the can and put it on a conveyor belt. You go to the waiting room, settle down in an easy chair, and watch a short film on preserves. Soon you’re called to the counter. You present your receipt and get your opened can. Then you return contentedly to Vasilyevski Island.”
“And they’re really going ahead with this project?”
“Petya very much hopes so. But recently some jealous people have shown up and are trying to keep his inventions from being used. They’re envious. Petya’s not jealous of anyone; he knows he’s an extraordinary man. And he’s objective, too. For example, he has the highest regard for another inventor—the one who invented the Drink to the Bottom bottle cap and saw it through production.”
“What’s a Drink to the Bottom cap?”
“You know how vodka bottles are sealed? With a little metal cap. You pull the tab on the cap, the metal tears, and the bottle is open. But you can’t use that cap to close it again so you have to finish the bottle, whether you want to or not.”
“I prefer the water skates,” Liussia reflected. “I’d love to glide across the bay on skates on a white night.”
“The skates have really caught your fancy, haven’t they?” Svetlana laughed. “Petya and I wouldn’t want them back if you paid us.”
Sergei shut off his IPM and thought for a while. Then he came to a decision.
That same evening Sergei got his pair of water skates from an old suitcase. He filled the bath with water and tested them: they didn’t sink but slid across the surface just as well as they had done years before. Then he went to his retreat and worked late into the night making a second pair of skates for Liussia.
The next day, a Sunday, Sergei put on his good gray suit and wrapped the two pairs of skates in a newspaper. He put an atomizer and a bottle of MSST (Multiple Strengthener of Surface Tension) in his pocket; if a person covered his clothing with this preparation, it would keep him afloat.
Finally, he opened the large closet in which he kept his most significant inventions and took out his SPOSEM (Special Purpose Optical Solar Energy Machine). He had worked very hard on this and considered it the most important of all his inventions. It had been finished for two years but had never been tested. Its purpose was to restore a person’s youth to him, and Sergei had never wanted his youth back again. If he made himself young again, he would have to make Tamara young too and begin life with her all again—but one life with her was quite enough. In addition, he was frightened at the extraordinarily high energy consumption of the machine; if he were to turn it on, there would be cosmic consequences, and Sergei had never regarded himself as important enough to warrant those consequences.
But now, after thinking things out carefully and weighing all considerations, he decided to use the machine. He put it in with the skates and left the house.
It was a short walk to Sredni Avenue. In a store on the corner of Fifth Street he bought a bottle of champagne and a box of chocolates before continuing on his way. At Eleventh Street he turned off Sredni Avenue and was soon at Liussia’s house; he climbed the steps and rang two long and one short on the bell. Liussia answered the door.
“Hello, Liussia! It’s been a long time since we met last.”
“Very long. But I’ve always been expecting you to come, and here you are.”
They entered Liussia’s room, drank champagne, and reminisced about things that had happened years before.
“Oh!” cried Liussia suddenly. “If only I were only young again and life could begin all over!”
“That’s in our power,” said Sergei, and showed her his SPOSEM, which was the size of a portable radio and had a rather thick cord attached to it.
“Do you plug it into the electrical system? Won’t it burn out? The house was recently switched to two hundred twenty volts.”
“No, it doesn’t get plugged into the electrical system. A thousand Dnieper powerhouses wouldn’t be enough to supply it. It gets its energy directly from the sun. Would you open the window, please?”
She opened it, and Sergei led the cord over to it. The cord had a small concave mirror attached to the end, and Sergei laid this on the windowsill so that it was turned directly to the sun. Then he switched the machine on. A crackling could be heard from inside the apparatus, and soon the sun began to look weaker, the way an incandescent bulb does when the current drops. The room grew dusky.
Liussia went to the window and looked out. “Sergei, what’s going on?” she asked in astonishment. “It looks as though an eclipse is beginning. The whole island is in dusk, and it’s getting dark in the distance, too.”
“It’s now dark over the whole earth and even on Mars and Venus. The machine uses a great deal of energy.”
“That kind of machine should never be mass-produced, then! Otherwise, everyone would become young again but there’d be darkness from then on.”
“Yes,” Sergei agreed. “The machine should be used only once. I gave it extra capacity for your sake. Now let’s sit down and remain quiet.”
They sat down on an old plush sofa, held hands, and waited. Meanwhile it had become dark as night. Throughout the city light sprang out of windows and street lamps were turned on. Liussia’s room was now completely black, except for a bluish light along the cord of the SPOSEM. The cord twisted and turned like a tube through which some liquid was being forced at great speed.
Suddenly the machine gave a loud crack and a square window opened in the front; from it leaped a ray of green light, which seemed to be chopped off at the end. The ray was like a solid object, yet it was only light. It became longer and longer and finally reached the wall with the picture of the pig and the oak tree. The pig in the picture suddenly changed into a piglet, and the oak with its huge branches into a tiny sapling.
The ray moved slowly and uncertainly across the room as if blindly seeking out Liussia and Sergei. Where it touched the wall, the old, faded hangings took on their original colors and became new again. The elderly gray tomcat who was dozing on the chest of drawers changed into a young kitten and immediately began to play with its tail. A fly, accidentally touched by the ray, changed into a larva and fell to the floor.
Finally the ray approached Sergei and Liussia. It ranged over their heads, faces, legs, and arms. Above their heads two shimmering half-circles formed, like haloes.
“Something’s tickling my head,” Liussia giggled.
“Don’t move, stay quiet,” said Sergei. “That’s because gray hairs are changing back to their original color. My head feels funny, too.”
“Oh!” cried Liussia. “There’s something hot in my mouth!”
“You have some gold caps on your teeth, haven’t you?”
“Only two.”
“Young teeth don’t need caps, so the caps are being pulverized. Just breathe the dust out.”
Liussia pursed her lips like an inexperienced smoker and blew out some gold dust.
“It feels as though the sofa were swelling under me,” she said suddenly.
“The springs are expanding because we’re getting lighter. We did put on some weight over the years!”
“You’re right, Sergei! I feel wonderfully light, the way I did at twenty.”
“You are twenty now. We’ve returned to our youth.”
At this moment the SPOSEM shivered, rumbled, and burst into flame. Then it was gone and only a little blue ash showed where it had been. All around them, everything was suddenly bright again. Motorists turned their headlights off, the street lamps went out, and the artificial light disappeared from the windows.
Liussia stood up and laughed as she looked at herself in the mirror. “Come on, Sergei, let’s go for a walk—maybe to Yelagin Island.”
Sergei picked up his bundle of skates, took Liussia’s arm, and went down the stairs into the street with her. They rode the streetcar to Cultural Park, where they strolled about for a long time, rode the merry-go-round, and ate two meals in a restaurant.
When the still white night had descended and the park was deserted, they went to the seashore. The sea was completely calm, without even the smallest wave, and in the distance, near Volny Island, the sails of the yachts hung motionless in the moonlight.
“Just the right kind of weather,” said Sergei as he unwrapped the water skates. He helped Liussia tie hers and then put his own on.
Liussia ran onto the water and skated lightly across it; Sergei followed. They came to the yachts, whose owners were waiting for a breeze; waved to them; and skated on past Volny Island to the open sea. They glided over the water for a long time, then Sergei suddenly slowed down; Liussia stopped and skated back to him.
“Liussia, do you know what I’d like to say to you?” Sergei began, somewhat unsure of himself.
“I know,” Liussia replied, “and I love you too. From now we’ll stay together for good.”
They embraced and kissed, then turned back to the shore. Meanwhile the wind had risen and was forming waves. It was becoming difficult to skate.
“Suppose I stumble and fall down into the water?” said Liussia.
“I’ll take precautions right now so that we won’t drown,” answered Sergei with a laugh. He took the atomizer and bottle of MSST from his pocket and sprayed his and Liussia’s clothing with the liquid.
“Now we can even ride the waves,” he said to her.
They sat down, close together, on a wave, as though it were a crystal bench, and the wave carried them back to the shore.