…this mystery that fell from heaven knows which sky,
this CREATURE OF UNKNOWN KIND
turned this place into a separate country,
into a magic country,
into an evil magic country from a magical alien planet…
When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth.
“The Sign of the Four”
The terms from the novels by I. Efremov,
A. and B. Strugatsky, I. Varshavsky and
F. Herbert are used in the following text…
“Requiem for the Pilot”
PROLOGUE
In the intervals between the vomiting spasms, every second of which was successful, Ensign Bashkalo, standing firmly on all fours on the left of Vadim, proclaimed the following:
– Mother… Aggrr… M-mother-f… Blaeee!.. Never again!… Damn it!… Damn all this crap of unknown kind… Fuck it!.. To hell with it!… Uuuuurrlaaa! Damn it with its gas meteorites, with its fogs, with its fucking heaviness-lightness and transparent vehicles.. damn it, b-bitch, neither bottom, nor tops! Blyuerrrrrgaaa! Fucking Gorbachev!
Senior Ensign Petrovich, who was also barfing on all fours on the right of Vadim, did not utter any understandable words. He was much older, and maybe that's why he was throwing up much more violently. But maybe age did not matter at all, and Mother-Trouble11 charged him for the passage in full, not partly.
Vadim did not feel sick at all. Physically, all was normal for him, no vomiting, no cramps, no bloody mist between the eye lens and the retina, actually he was not even frightened as he was supposed to, such an incredible deed they had accomplished, human fear was just inapplicable. Another level of shock had to be experienced in this case, something like the aura of the first step into open Space, with a view the whole world, when your personal life and death are not particularly significant in the context of this achievement, and you are conscious of it. Like that. Physically Vadim was tired, as if he was rubber and inflatable and he had suddenly been pierced with a needle. No less, but no more either. He was standing between Bashkalo and Petrovich, resting the hands on his knees, and, trying not to move, he looked at the pole number 323, the first one on this side of the railway, and imagined a man who had stuck it in the brown clay of the Astrakhan semi-desert one day (A year ago? A year and a half ago? A thousand years ago?). There was someone who first crossed the royal narrow-gauge railway, who had guessed to step on board of the second railcar passing by, iron only in appearance, but to touch, in the light – it was a ghostly film take, projected by a mysterious unknown type of film projector on a load of tobacco smoke… What is it called?.. “Combined shooting”!21 Someone thought up, guessed, found out about jumping through the iron ghost, and crossed an impassable, deadly, cruelly killing railroad. Someone risked it first. And stuck the pole into a bush of black wormwood. Pole three hundred and twenty-three. The first one on this side. And also, probably, was puking… Most likely Senior Ensign Petrovich personally knows this genius, hero and psycho. Or maybe it was he himself? How it rinses him out! Similar to Vadim himself yesterday on the “neutral” when the Zone was welcoming and evaluating him.
Time was passing, whether a dozens or hundreds of seconds went by, but Bashkalo's vocabulary exhausted itself and Petrovich no longer sobbed weepingly spewing out his afternoon snack, and soon there only were two raucous breaths on the left and right. And the smells, unexpectedly strong as if they were in a small enclosed space. Then everything completely subsided, and Vadim noticed that Petrovich is sitting on the ground in Shukshin's pose
