Self-discovery

But he headed for Vladivostok anyway. He didn't leave to still his longings — he ran away from the horrors of memory. He would have gone even farther, but farther there was only ocean. Of course, the job opening as a fitter in the ports had been filled, but he found work excavating underwater cliffs, to clear space for ship berths — that wasn't bad work either. There was enough romance: he dove into the blue green depths with his scuba gear, saw his quivering shadow on the bottom rocks, dug out holes in the cliffs, set the dynamite, lit the fuse, and scattering the fish that would be floating belly up in a minute, swam at breakneck speeds for the power boat. And then, missing engineering work, he introduced an electrohydraulic charge, which was safer than dynamite and more effective. He left behind all memories of himself.

“Are you coming from far?” the woman insisted, interrupting his reverie.

“From the Far East.”

“Were you recruited to work there or did you just go?”

The man stared at her and laughed curtly.

“I went for a cure.”

His traveling companion nodded warily. She had lost all desire for conversation. She pulled out a book and buried herself in it.

Yes, the healing began there. The guys on the team were amazed by his fearlessness. He really had no fear: strength, agility, exact calculation — and no deep wave could touch him. He literally held his own life in his hands — what was there to be afraid of? The most terrifying times he had lived through had been here, in Dneprovsk, when Krivoshein played God with his life and death. With many deaths. You see, Krivoshein did not understand that what he was doing was much worse than torturing a helpless person.

The man's body tensed automatically. A chill of anger puckered his skin into goose bumps. The monsoons had blown a lot out of his system in a year: depression, panicky fear, even his tender feelings for Lena. But this remained.

“Maybe I shouldn't have come back? I had the ocean that made me feel small and simple, good pals, and hard and interesting work. Everyone respected me. I became myself out there. But here… who knows how things will go for him?”

But he could no more not return than forget the past. At first, it would creep up on him, after work, on days off, when the whole team took a speedboat into Vladivostok. The thought would pound through his head: “Krivoshein is working. He's alone there.” Then the idea came to him.

Once when they were clearing the bottom in a nameless cove near Khabarovsk, where there were warm mineral springs along the shore, he jumped from the boat and fell into a stream. He almost screamed from the horrible memories in his body! The water tasted just like that liquid, and the sensationless, warm gentleness seemed to conceal that ancient threat to dissolve, destroy, and extinguish consciousness. He moved ahead, and the cold ocean water sobered and calmed him. But the impression remained. By evening it had turned into a thought: “The experiment could be run in reverse.”

And, while healing from his former memories, he “caught” this one. His researcher's imagination was aflame. How enticing it would be to plan an experiment, to try to predict the enormous results that would bring great benefit! The underwater explosions seemed like a dull, gray waste. Now without fear, he played back everything that had happened to him, projected the variations of the experiment. And he could not remain there with the idea that Krivoshein had probably not thought of it yet. You couldn't come up with it by pure reason alone. You had to have lived through everything that he had.

But — the implacable logic of their work brought another idea forward in his mind: all right, so they would find a new way of processing a man with information. What would it give them? This thought was harder than the first. On the way from Vladivostok to Dneprovsk he turned to it often, and he still had not thought it all the way through.

Outside the window, the girders of a bridge reflected the clattering wheels of the train: they were crossing the Dnieper River. The man was distracted for a moment, watching a powerboat skim the water's surface down the river's current, and looking at the green slope of the right bank. The bridge ended and little houses, gardens, and hedges flashed by the window.