He Will Wake in Two Hundred Years

man was walking through the forest, walking purposefully, thrusting aside branches as he went, and taking anthills and fallen logs in his stride. From time to time he took off his glasses to brush away the cobwebs that clung there and when he did so you could see his eyes. He was about twenty-five.

He walked for a long time, till at last he emerged in a small clearing surrounded by a thick wall of bushes. Bending down, he rolled back some heavy object and a shaft opened up at his feet.

Before he descended, the man took a long look round. He had gone over this moment in his mind many times but now the knowledge that he was never going to see these bushes and trees again, that he was taking his last look at all this, for some reason failed to move him. He lingered for a while, waiting for the sense of parting to come, but it never did.

Slowly the man descended. The moss-coated brick slab rolled over heavily, closing the shaft behind him, and the clearing returned to its former state. A wind raced over the treetops and then all was quiet again.

The idea had first come to him as he stood in a shop looking at some frozen fish. Apparently, when they thawed, these frozen slabs of ice came back to life; their fins stirred again and their round eyes goggled stupidly at the world. Andrei had as yet been unprepared to accept the idea that was forming in his mind and he had started reading about anabiosis. In his way he had learnt of experiments which had been carried out on warm-blooded creatures, even on man: men had been brought back to life after long anabiosis, the one essential factor was to maintain a constant temperature.

From the first, the idea of a journey into non-existence had been attractive - to plunge abruptly through twenty or thirty years to the amazement of everyone who knew him. But then Andrei had decided that this would not be a great enough contrast - at least what he saw at the end of such a period would not go far towards meeting the promises of tales from science fiction. In any case, the temptation to transport himself deep into the obscure future was too great. For that it would be enough to jump a period of about one hundred years. Finally, he settled on two hundred.

After that things developed as if fate itself had wanted him to achieve his aim. The point was that Andrei had a job. He worked in a none too pleasant concern which styled itself ‘publishers of dictionaries’. How he came to be there Andrei himself could not have said. Unlike the rest of his fellow workers in this exalted establishment, Andrei was not convinced that he fulfilled his aim in life by sorting index cards and wilting over dictionaries. His obsession with anabiosis could not fail to affect, in a most unfortunate way, the forthcoming dictionary of embriology in the language of Tierra del Fuego, a publication which - if the managing editress Miss Vetashevskaya was to be believed - was eagerly awaited by all nations from Tierra del Fuego to Taimir.

The worse things got at work for Andrei the more he dreamed of transporting himself to the shining era of photon rockets and Martian landscapes. So was born the plan for an underground room in which an automatically controlled refrigeration system would maintain a constant low temperature - as one set of units began to wear out, another would switch itself on automatically. His biggest problem was to find a system of fuelling, for the most powerful complex of accumulators imaginable would not have been adequate for such a period. By the time the theoretical part was finally worked out, such clouds had gathered over Andrei’s head at work that there was nothing for it but to start putting it into practice.

Miss Vetashevskaya announced that under no circumstances would she keep on unsuitable employees, the unsuitable employee in question being Andrei. He was jeopardizing the ties of friendship between peoples which were being welded through the publication of the dictionary of embriology. A grim report was dispatched to higher levels and in the end Andrei was summoned before the board. After that he worked like an ox for two months, accomplishing work which was to have taken a year to get through. The dictionary of embriology in the language of Tierra del Fuego was brought to the letter ‘B’. At this point he put aside the cards and busied himself with his own work.

Andrei had chosen this particular clearing in the forest because it seemed to him remote enough to ensure that it would not be interfered with for two centuries. He had had to have the sacks of cement brought by lorry. The driver had been taken aback when Andrei ordered him to unload the sacks at the end of the forest. He had looked at Andrei anxiously, but then, accepting that he was dealing with a mental defective, he calmed down and climbed into the back of the lorry. His suspicions were only completely allayed when Andrei finally paid him off. Lumbering over the bumpy ground the lorry had driven off, leaving Andrei alone on a pile of sacks.

He had worked in the forest all summer. He spent his holiday there and another month taken without pay, and only now, at the end of the autumn, were things finally ready.

When the trap closed over him, Andrei switched on the light. The room was oval-shaped, but with the degree of irregularity which is, it seems, inevitable when such a job is taken on by an amateur.

Andrei tested the systems for the last time. Everything was working faultlessly. Andrei switched them on again, and then again. He knew that this was a deliberate delaying tactic on his part. Quickly, to eliminate any possibility of retreat, Andrei swallowed a sleeping pill and lay down on the special platform in the centre of the room. The light went out. In twenty minutes’ time, when he would already be sleeping deeply, the freezing systems would switch themselves on. Andrei closed his eyes. It seemed to him that he could hear the wind chasing the dry leaves across the clearing above him.

He had managed to say goodbye to everyone. That was good. Even to Lena. Andrei’s heart contracted, but he forced himself to think about something else.

During these last few days Andrei needn’t really have gone to work, but he had gone all the same, and he had done everything that was put in front of him. Today was Saturday, his last day at the publishing house. For the others, this day was no different from any of the days that had gone before or from the days that would follow. On Monday, they would all meet again within these same walls. Only Andrei knew that for him there would be no Monday and this secret, which he could share with no one, was sweetly tormenting to him.

‘Ox-eyed’, ‘Oxygen’, ‘Oxymel’ ... Andrei tried to sort the word cards, but somehow he couldn’t get on with the work today. He stared out of the window, and then at Vera, the typist, who as usual on Saturdays seemed to spend her time looking in the mirror. Then Andrei looked at the five familiar heads, bent as usual over five tables snowed under with cards, dictionaries and galley proofs, and he began mentally to compose a farewell speech.

‘My dear friends - and not just friends,’ he would begin. ‘I’m leaving you and we shall never meet again. I’m going into the future as an ambassador from our age. I will tell the people of the future about our times and about all of you.’

Andrei would no doubt have expanded on this in some way had he not been summoned out of his creative state by Vera’s voice.

‘Andrei! Telephone.’

He took the receiver.

It was the compiler of the dictionary, a worthy old gentleman who could not have chosen a more appropriate moment to call.

‘This is very important,’ his penetrating voice trumpeted down the telephone. ‘The word “cloudy-eyed” - we’ve got it in the dictionary, but we must give the diminutive form, and the superlative, you know, with the prefix “pikh-pikh-kha-kha” - this is important from the point of view of the scholarliness of the work.’

The old fellow was the only specialist in the language of Tierra del Fuego and as such was the pride of academic circles. He had been the pupil of Professor Beloshadsky who in his turn had studied the language under Professor Starotserkovsky. Starotserkovsky had been a pupil of Professor Wold, and Wold claimed to have studied under Beloshadsky. If this were indeed the case, then it was a closed circle and in all probability represented an interesting phenomenon in the field of linguistics.

Andrei deliberately delayed so as to be the last to leave - he wanted to remove the wall newspaper unobtrusively and to take it with him. Together with a parcel of pamphlets, newspapers and amateur photographs already gathered in the room, it represented what he mentally referred to as ‘a relic of the age’.

Andrei carefully removed the drawing pins and the paper sprang into a roll of its own accord. The wall looked suddenly naked.

Even though everything was already decided and Andrei knew that he would go through with what he had planned, he experienced at the last moment a need to cut off any possibility of turning back: indecisive people usually force themselves to act decisively by some such means. Since no more brilliant idea came to him, he simply made a careful drawing of Vetashevskaya’s features, embellishing them with a pair of projecting donkey’s ears - one ear he drew standing up, the other hung down. So that everything would be final and irrevocable, he signed the portrait: ‘Dear Managing Editress, from Andrei’. Crossing the office stealthily, he put the page on Vetashevskaya’s table under the glass top.

Andrei emerged from the publishing house highly elated. The very idiocy of this prank had served to put him in such a state. Now there was no way back. There was only the way forward into the future where silvery, interstellar, craft soared up through an azure sky on their way to distant worlds. And, because of this, it was so pleasant to descend the white staircase knowing that this would be the last time!

As he remembered all this, Andrei smiled in the darkness. It was not until he had got off the electric train at the station that he had remembered his watch. He made a present of it to some small boy who raced off, beside himself with excitement at the unexpected gift.

Andrei lay for some time without thinking, and only now from somewhere in the depths of his consciousness there began to well up a sense of regret for the world he was leaving. He began to tell himself over and over again that he could stop the experiment whenever he chose, go out of the room and leave the forest. For a long time he lay there, calmed by the thought and feeling good. But when he tried (or it seemed to him that he tried) to get up, some kind of thick black flakes suddenly fell from somewhere up there in the region of the ceiling, and he couldn’t get up any more ...

Only a moment passed, an indescribably brief moment, and consciousness slowly began to return. It floated like a golden point in front of him, rising out of the black depths of nonexistence and coming nearer. Then some circles appeared and began merging into the centre faster and faster until they froze, quivering slightly and became the small electric light burning directly overhead. The bulb gave off a feeble, slightly reddish glow.

The realization of where he was and what awakening meant came immediately, but he went on lying there motionless for a long time. He felt terrible, like an enormous frozen hulk and only his brain seemed to be active. He could feel the stony immobility of his body and was afraid to stir: he was afraid of the helpless panic that would follow if he proved unable to do so. And then, if the temperature failed to rise so that his flesh could regain life, he would not be able to raise the icy slab that was his hand to turn the heater a little to the right ... a little to the right... a little to the right...

He moved his fingers, then his hand. It turned out to be easier than he expected. A moment later Andrei was sitting up.

He opened the trap with difficulty. Directly overhead the stars were shining. Suddenly he was overwhelmed again by fear. This time it was fear of the unknown and strange world he had striven so hard to encounter. Now this world was lurking somewhere on the outside, waiting for him.

A feeling of infinite loneliness swept over him. Even the graves of the men he had once known had been forgotten, long, long ago. It was only now that he really experienced the irrevocability of what had happened and realized the full cruelty of the fate he had doomed himself to.

Throwing back his head Andrei slowly started to climb the steps.

Andrei tried hard not to think about what would now open up before his eyes: an ashy, burnt-out steppe and dead, uninhabited horizons; a white town of gleaming plastic; or a world devoid of people, all destroyed by epidemics brought by those who had been to other planets.

Andrei was prepared for anything. He took the last step and looked out.

All around was the forest. The wind was chasing dry leaves among the bushes.

Andrei laughed. Somewhere far away a bird screeched. He decided to go in the direction from which he had come two hundred years before. Andrei walked for a long time. Possibly he passed many times over the site of the old railway line, long since buried under a layer of earth and overgrown by the forest. The night dragged on and still there was no break in the forest.

If he did not get anywhere by morning, he would have to return to his room, but would the provisions he had taken with him have survived?

Andrei opened a packet of glucose and made himself eat a few tablets.

It was beginning to grow light.

The forest thinned out unexpectedly and Andrei suddenly caught sight of a long platform and alongside it what he would once have called railway carriages. An absurd, atavistic fear of missing a train overcame him and to his surprise he suddenly found himself running towards the platform. He didn’t have time to look around or to think - he was hardly in the carriage when the contraption moved off and, gathering speed, rushed somewhere past the shadowy, pre-dawn forest.

Andrei was alone in the large oblong compartment which reminded him somehow of the suburban carriages of his own age. Even the seats were covered with those strips of plastic which faithfully imitated the texture of wood.

When the forest came to an end some time later, Andrei’s bewilderment increased still further. He had been prepared for anything, but not for this - this was a very strange civilization, a civilization which deliberately, though not always successfully, imitated the past. The train rushed non-stop past small houses with T-shaped antennae on their roofs, past stations built of some unknown materials but in the style that Andrei knew so well.

Then he saw people - two men and a woman walking somewhere across the fields. The cut of their clothes did not even come as a surprise to Andrei now, and when the train stopped soon after, he saw that the few people who got into the carriage were dressed more or less the same as he was. No one paid any attention to him. People settled themselves down in the carriage in ones and twos. Some were talking quietly about something, but Andrei could not hear words, he only saw their faces, which were intelligent and kind. Yes, this was how people of the future ought to look. But what a strange world this was!

Andrei had once read of villages in Polynesia which had not changed their appearance for thousands of years, and of towns of the Middle Ages which had existed unchanged for centuries. True, abrupt jumps and changes in all fields had been characteristic of the age in which he himself had once lived, in technology, architecture and the external appearance of the world. But what was there to say that this tendency should go on for ever? Could not progress equally well take some other course than changing the external appearance of the world?

The train had slowed down and stopped. Everyone began getting out and the compartment emptied. Andrei, too, went to the door. He stood on the platform which looked just like the platform of any station of the past. He would have to find somewhere to sit down and collect his thoughts, to work out some plan of action.

Suddenly a voice broke out from some unknown source - a loud, proud voice whose words carried over the heads of the crowd. A few steps farther on Andrei began distinguishing words and everything inside him tensed...

‘Workers in city and country are preparing for the great day. Unprecedented enthusiasm reigns these days in factories and on construction sites ... Inspired by a concern for ...’

A wild, almost incredible realization flashed through his brain. Andrei felt the platform slipping away from under him. Swaying on his feet he took a few more steps and then stopped. Directly in front of him was a newspaper stand.

He raised his eyes and read the name of the newspaper. And the year. And the day.

He had, it seemed, slept for just over twenty-four hours. It was Monday ...

Andrei sank down on someone’s suitcase and he was poked in the back by a woman who started to shout something - it was her suitcase he was sitting on and she didn’t care about Andrei or about what had happened to him. Neither did the people who swept past him hurrying on their way somewhere. To them, Andrei could neither have told, shouted nor explained what had happened.

When the shock of the first moments wore off Andrei, to his own surprise, felt neither disillusioned nor disappointed. Somewhere in his heart there rose a cowardly joy that he had escaped, and this world and these people whom he had so light-heartedly prepared to leave, now seemed to him dearer than all future epochs and worlds. In any case, Andrei was sure of one thing, that he could never force himself to go through it all again. But then he remembered Vetashevskaya. What would become of him now? If she had already arrived at the office, he was done for! There and then began a race between Andrei, thrusting his way convulsively through the crowd on the station square towards a taxi, and Vetashevskaya who was at that moment unhurriedly mounting the wide staircase. She answered greetings and from time to time stopped to say a few condescending words. When Andrei finally raced up to a taxi, shouts of anger rose from the long queue overflowing with children and suitcases. And again, words were useless, and gestures couldn’t help him - people shouted something into his face and waved their fists at him. When at last he did get into a taxi, the minute hand of the big station clock had moved noticeably to the right, approaching, perhaps even passing, the point which marked the fatal hour. At the very moment that Andrei slammed shut the door of the taxi, Vetashevskaya was going through the doorway of her office. Racing up the staircase, Andrei heard his heart beating loudly and the familiar white steps seemed to be drawing themselves upwards so that it seemed he would never reach the landing at the top. When he saw the open door of the office, it seemed like a terrible dream. There sat the executive staff, and the director, and Vetashevskaya, whose face had broken out in crimson patches, was showing them the portrait. Even from a distance Andrei could make out the donkey’s ears, one standing up, the other hanging down.

For some reason no one even glanced in his direction, and when Andrei tried to speak, or rather to shout something, he could feel that only his lips were moving - no voice came.

At that precise moment, he felt himself go cold and he began to understand why no one looked at him. On the carpet where his feet should have been, there were no feet. There was nothing of him at all; but he didn’t even have time to feel surprised because from somewhere above him those thick black flakes fell again.

Andrei was lying on the platform in the middle of the round, brick room deep underground. He was not alive and he was not dead. On his forehead, hoarfrost was forming.

He would wake in two hundred years.

Translated by D. Matias