A SNOW BRIDGE OVER THE ABYSS

A person can really go crazy. This here article is quite far from
perfection and continues staying that way. Opening it at random, I
come across the following paragraph:

"Questions of Psychology: The greatest disagreement between two
hypotheses is determined by the mean and the dispersion of the sum of
random variables, which is equal to the sum of the middle rates and
the dispersion of the distribution from where the variables come."

Sounds good, doesn't it? "The dispersion of the sum... which... from
where..." This is what an article should really be like, isn't it? Dull
and incomprehensible, with a lot of tongue-twisters thrown in for
good measure.

"Scribas?" The Gale of the Eight Seas says in his doubtful Esperanto. "I
am asking if you are writing."

He is standing at the entrance of the tent with a frying pan in his
hands. The sun is merrily reflected from the bald head of The Gale of
the Eight Seas.

"Come on in, old fellow," I say, "as you see, the job is quite stillborn.
The article simply cannot go well."

"It happens sometimes," The Gale of the Eight Seas tries to calm me
down. He puts the frying pan on the case which plays the role of a
table and mumbles: "Shi pris preter domo sia... No, domo de sia onclo.
She was walking to her uncle's home."

"What uncle? What are you talking about, old fellow?"

"Sia onclo. Her uncle. I am doing an exercise with the preposition
'preter'. And I brought rosta fish for you. It means 'roast chub'."

I eat the fish and listen to the chattering of the old man and an
excellent thought comes into my mind. My attempts at writing in a
scientific language are not so much different from the Esperanto
drills of The Gale of the Eight Seas. Well, what if I simply retold the
story of the discovery of the AC-effect in my own words? Let the
editors edit the necessary things out, let them wrestle with the
precise terms. After all, the main thing are the facts.

"Li rigardis... rigardis..." The Gale of the Eight Seas bitterly sighs. "I
have forgotten, you see. Here it is... for example, he was looking: li
rigardis, and where to hell rigardis - I forgot. All right, you scribu,
donu scribu, I am going, I must prepare the fishing nets."

And so, here comes the story of the invention of the AC-effect. This
is a story from way back when. From the depths of antiquity. From
the epoch when we lived in Taganrog and were in the sixth form. A
long time has passed since then. Five years! Or yes, five and a half.
We were in the sixth form then, the third term was coming to its end
and Nastia had got an F in math. In fact, everything began with that
F.

Maths had always been a very closed book to Nastia, ever since the
days of our first classes together. But this time the situation was
catastrophical, and with a complete understanding of its gravity both
Sasha Geim and I were trying to rescue her. I was doing my best
because she was my friend. Geim was at that time considered an infant
prodigy in mathematics, he was really brilliant, and the problems
which we were given to solve were more than simple for him. Geim
manifested his extreme brilliance a year and a half later, but for us
he was a mathematical genius from the first moment he set his foot in
our class.

He gave lessons to Nastia almost every evening, with me a willing
helper - he wouldn't have been able to do it if I wasn't there to
defuse the situation now and then. We poured math down Nastia's ears,
but the end result was nil. And the last test for the term was
forthcoming.

So we gathered together at Nastia's place on the evening before the
test and began solving problems. This evening Geim was bursting with
barely suppressed emotions. He had found a thick mathematical volume,
which he had started secretly reading during classes and now he was
desperately anxious to run back home to it.

"Try to think a little," Geim irritably said, crumpling one of the many
sheets full of mistakes. "You cannot solve a problem without reading
the conditions to the end. What are you laughing at?"

"The lamp is reflected from your glasses," Nastia explained to him. "In
every glass there is a lamp. And when you get angry, they shine as if
they are burning."

"There are two points," Geim continued in his stony voice. "Point A and
point B. Do you understand?" He took two pencils and put them on both
sides of the math textbook. Nastia stopped laughing. "The distance
between these two points is eight kilometers. Is that clear? A
pedestrian has started from point A at a speed of 5 kilometers per
hour. At the same time a bus has started from point B in the same
direction. Note that they are both moving in the same direction -
that is very important."

"And where are they moving to?" Nastia asked.

"To where!" Geim shouted, spreading his hands to engulf the whole of
the table. "Somewhere here or there, what is so interesting in that?
The important thing is that they are both going in the same
direction. And that the bus reaches the pedestrian in 20 minutes. We
must find the speed of the bus."

"OK!" Nastia agreed. "There's no need to shout, I am going to find it."

She began solving the problem, looking at the pencils. Geim sat still
and looked at his watch.

"Phooey," Nastia sighed with joy. "Look here, one hundred and seventy
can be divided by thirty nine without leaving any remainder.
Therefore everything is right. And I was afraid it couldn't be
divided. The answer is: three kilometers per hour."

"Three kilometers!" Geim blew his top. "You, Nastia, are an unique
little fool. The pedestrian walks at a speed of 5 km per hour, the bus
starts after the pedestrian and overtakes him after some time,
therefore its speed is bigger than that of the pedestrian. Try to
think a little - how will the bus reach the pedestrian if it crawls at
three km/h?"

Here I had to intrude because Nastia felt hurt at being called an
"unique little fool". I turned over the pages of the textbook and found
an easier problem: at 9 o'clock in the morning a freight train starts
from a station and at noon an express train is off. Find out at what
time the express will reach the freight train.

"Let's suppose that you aren't a fool," generously agreed Geim. "I don't
insist on that definition. But the fact that you cannot think logically
is an axiom. Oh, if you had only read that book by Poy - "Mathematics
and the likely contentions". Poy gives the common method for solving
problems. You must always follow the logical path - you see, there is,
especially in such simple problems, only one logically correct approach
to the problem."

"That is just what I do!" Nastia objected. "First I see the answer and
then I solve the problem."

"'I see the answer' you say, but I am talking about something else. To
solve the problem logically means to imagine what exactly you must
find. For example here in this problem you must find the time. Let's
think further. What does 'time' mean?"

"Well, time... this is, er... it goes."

"Time is the distance divided by the speed. Do you understand? We
know the speed. In this case - the difference in the speeds. And if we
find the distance, the problem will be solved. OK?"

"No, I can't do it that way. From the answer, yes, but in this way -
no."

Geim wanted to say something spiteful, but I showed him my fist.
Nastia stuck to the problem for a long time. She multiplied and
divided some six-digit numbers. At last she announced that the
express would overtake the freight train at 10 o'clock in the morning.

"Look, Kira, something has happened to him." Nastia whispered
fearfully, pointing at Geim. "Look at him!"

Something had definitely happened to him! According to Nastia, the
express would overtake the freight train before it had even started
from the station. I was sorry for Geim, I understood the way he felt
at that moment, but we still had an exam to prepare for. Geim kept his
eyes on his watch and gave Nastia one more problem.

"I will solve it for sure!" Nastia said uncertainly. "Don't be angry with
me, Sasha. You yourself said that Einstein had regularly flunked math
during his school years, didn't you? And here you are, nagging at me.
I shall certainly solve the problem, I understand it perfectly well:
Two-thirds of the water was poured out from a boiling pot. So one
third remained. As you see, I understand everything. The pot was
filled up with water at a temperature of 20 degrees... The temperature
of the water in the pot is to be determined. Well, there are four
questions here..."

Geim came closer and started watching her actions. Nastia wrote down
four equations, put the answer in brackets and sighed with relief.
Geim's face turned green. He took his hat and left, slamming the door
without saying good-bye.

Nastia blinked rapidly in confusion and I could see she was trying
very hard to hold back her tears.

"But I didn't want to offend him!" She sighed. "Kira, I certainly didn't
mean it. Why did he go away?"

What a question! What else was Geim supposed to do, when according to
Nastia's solution the temperature of the water in the pot was two
hundred and forty degrees?!

Geim had gone but I couldn't leave. On the other hand, I didn't know
Poy's book "Mathematics and likely contentions" and I was not an
infant prodigy in math. I attending a theatre group where we didn't
talk about math, but rather about Stanislavski's method. At home we
also talked about the teachings of Stanislavski; both my mother and
father were theatrical actors. And so I started teaching Nastia
according to this system. I simply had no other choice.

"Don't cry!" I sternly said to Nastia. "Stop crying and try to imagine
the events which are taking place in the problem. As in a performance.
Or in a film. Look, the pedestrian is walking along the road. Imagine
the pedestrian. Who is he? How is he dressed? And why does he have
to walk? And there the rain comes, and such a drizzle it is! You can
imagine that, can't you? Well, it is clear that the pedestrian is
worried, he is even getting angry that he has not waited for the bus.
And he starts calculating whether the bus will reach him or not."

"No," Nastia interrupted me. "He knows that the bus will reach him. He
calculates if it will reach him soon. Here is what he thinks - I shall
raise my hand and the driver will stop the bus. And the rain, of
course, is falling harder and harder."

Finally! At that moment I was ten times more pleased than the wet
pedestrian was when he saw the bus at last. "Go ahead, Nastia," said I.
"Enter into the character of the thing. You did it!"

And she really did it. She gnawed at the pencil which represented
point A and looked at me strangely, as though she was looking
straight through me, somewhere far away in the distance. And there
was the road, covered with gravel, and the pedestrian, a nice boy in a
stripped shirt, was walking along it and listening for the bus.

"Things went wrong," Nastia sighed. "The bus didn't stop, it sprayed
him with water, wrapped him up with stinking smoke and floated away.
At a speed of forty five kilometers per hour."

She hadn't looked at the answer, she had found out those 45 km/h by
herself.

We got down to the train at once. To tell you the truth, it didn't go
too well at the beginning. Nastia kept thinking about the pedestrian
whom the bus didn't take; it continued raining cats and dogs and
there was no place for the pedestrian to shelter. All this was in
Nastia's way and she couldn't fully enter into the problem of the
freight train, which felt offended that the bombastic express was
going to overtake it soon. On the other hand, she very quickly
entered into the problems of the boiling pot. She even whistled,
entering completely into the spirit of the problem. And she felt sorry
for the pot. It was not a new pot, it was blackened, sluggish and
dirty. Its handle had been broken and carelessly fixed with wire. And
sometime in its past it had been taken to a lot of picnics...

That is how everything began.

I couldn't foresee then, of course, what would come out of all that. I
was very happy when Nastia passed the math exam. She did it all by
herself. It was a remarkable achievement and we continued working
together. I made Nastia enter into the spirit of every problem. The
method was a smash hit, but we needed a lot of time; it is not so easy
to relive some problems, like those, for instance, of a farm field which
is three eights full of wheat, ten ninths of maize, with some other
crops thrown in for good measure...

What else could I do? Geim had already begun his vigorous career, he
didn't have a single minute free and I was able to teach Nastia only
by using Stanislavski's system.

And things went well - in the sixth form and in the seventh and
further on. Nastia was doing her best, she even slimmed down a bit.
Only her eyes seemed to be getting larger with every passing year.
Earlier on I somehow hadn't paid any attention to the color of her
eyes. One day I noticed that her eyes were like the sky during a
storm. They were grey, but looked dark black. Large eyes the color of
a stormy sky. And more and more often a strange gaze appeared in
them - a gaze which passed right through you, through the walls,
seeing some far place away where trains moved from point A to point
B, and buses overtook pedestrians. And I constantly pushed her on.

"Go ahead, imagine what exactly is going on there." Those were the
words I used all the time, never imagining where all that would lead
us to. Everything seemed so natural to me.

Igor Laubis, for example - he has a good memory and uses it. Nina
Gusseva has read lots of books - her insight and store of general
knowledge help her. Sasha Geim was born to be a mathematician. Well,
Nastia relies on the help of her imagination and that is all.

At that time I didn't know that a psychological experiment had begun.
The memory is a whole science in itself, so, the question is, how do we
develop it? There is a whole branch of science devoted to that. But
nobody had yet done similar tests on developing the imagination.
Nobody knew what incredible possibilities were hidden there.

Our house is on Ispulkomovska street and just behind the corner, on
Karl Libknecht street, were some people who one summer had invited a
relative of theirs, a boy, to live with them. He was a well nourished
pink dullard. And he trained spitting at a target throughout the
summer. He sat on a bench all day long, spitting at a sheet of paper
with circles drawn on it. A distinguished occupation! He learned to hit
the bulls-eye with five out of every ten spittles for a mere three
months! See what hard training can do!

And Nastia trained for much loner than a mere three months. She
trained hard for five whole years, day in and day out, until we
finished high school. She imagined thousands of problems. She probably
had the necessary natural talent as well.

We passed from the problems with pedestrians, trains and towns to the
uninhabitable region of sines, frustum of cones and biquadratic
equations. But Nastia could imagine every problem. She even saw the
trigonometrical functions of the acute angle as the closely
interconnected features of the character of a man named O'Angle. That
man constantly changed in front of her eyes: one of the quantities
replaces the others, something infinitely increases, something is
irrevocably lost. At 60 degrees O'Angle is quite different than he is
at 20.

But O'Angle - this was nothing! Nastia gave life even to the very
impersonal X-es and Y-s. I thought I had seen everything, but I
couldn't understand how she distinguished the X-es from the Y-s; they
were different in every case, I insisted.

"Here is a system of equations:

2 * X * X - Y = 2

X * X * X - Y = 1

Will you, please, tell me what you see in them."

"But how can't you see?" Said Nastia. "This X is a thin, dull freshman.
Look here, he is boasting, he wants to be bigger, he raises to the
second power, to the third, he doubles, but all the same he remains
little. And his face is dirty with ink. If you subtract the Y almost
nothing will be left. But I feel sorry for the boy." Nastia went on. "I
keep on thinking - let them take nothing from him, let this Y leave
him in peace and disappear. And here you can very clearly see what a
thin thing this X is: he has been raised to the third power but is
still equal to one."

Once, when I was in the eight form, I was asked to help with the
first-form pupils. Their teacher was ill and the seniors had to take
his classes. I took Nastia with me. That was a very important episode
in the story of the discovery of the AC-effect.

Try to imagine thirty kids in a classroom. They are quite noisy and
naughty, of course. But here comes Nastia and starts telling them the
story of the Little Red Riding Hood. Two minutes later such a silence
has enveloped the room that you can hear Nastia's new shoes creaking.
I, the fool, am very glad and don't even think that the children may
be frightened. Nastia is at the part where the Little Red Riding Hood
walks through the quiet woods. She does not try to achieve any
dramatic effect. She is far away and is telling us what she sees. And
she sees an awful forest, which ends in eternity. Not a single sound
comes back from the abyss of purple darkness. Bony grey trunks
thickly encircle the Little Red Riding Hood, and stuffy clouds of vapor
float over the path, thickening in a sticky white mist. The boughs
soundlessly fall behind her like snakes, blocking her way back.

These winding snake-boughs just about finished two little girls in the
front row and they started crying, but Nastia didn't even look at
them. I felt confused. After all, Nastia was telling the truth and the
children were listening, weren't they? At that moment Nastia reached
the point where the wolf swallows the grandma without cutting her up.
And Nastia surely described him very well. So well that all the kids
began wailing. Then the head-master came running and we had a lot to
suffer...

It was on this day that I began to realize that the experiment with
Nastia was something unusual. I went to the library, borrowed a
psychology textbook for the Teacher-training Institute and started
reading.

If the marks are good everything is all right. That was how I thought
of it then. It was naive, of course. I know that Nastia would be quite
different now if it wasn't for that night before the test. Most
probably my fate would be different too. I used to dream of the
cinema, of the theatre, I was part of a drama circle for three years,
until at the end they told me that I should either devote all my time
to acting, or else drop it altogether. They were right. I missed
rehearsals, I didn't learn the parts, I started losing my interest
towards art.

I began reading books on psychology. I was captivated by two works of
Jean Piahis: "Problems of Genetic Psychology" and "The importance of
action in the formation of thinking" and more and more often I found
myself thinking that I was moving in the right direction. You see, the
tendency towards passive observation, if we may say so, is very
strong in psychology. Even the psychological experiments are passive
observations in continuously changing conditions. Imagine only for a
second what would happen if the physicists decided to limit themselves
to experiments at low temperatures, pressures and speed - where
would modern physics be now? No doubt, psychology deals with human
beings and should be very careful, but no matter what, we are obliged
to do active experimental research into the possibilities of the human
brain.

It is a funny job. I was quite distressed at that time that I couldn't
do a test on myself. I did not have any new ideas. I had nothing else
to do but continue the experiment with Nastia.

I informed Nastia that from now on she was an experimental subject.
She smiled and looked at me, no, not at me - through me, with her
large eyes the color of a stormy sky.

From that moment on I made Nastia enter into the characters of all
our lessons - in literature, physics, chemistry and even in art. Of
course, not everything went well. In history, for instance. History
requires accuracy, it is not math, where you can see the pedestrian as
a merry person or not, where you can stop the bus in your thoughts
or you can imagine that it has passed without stopping. Once Nastia
imagined Menshikov, already an exile, standing by the window of a
house. It was raining outside and Menshikov carelessly and listlessly
was shaving his beard with an electrical shaver. Can you imagine that
- during the first half of the nineteenth century! But Nastia insisted
that she saw that picture very well and even heard the buzz of the
shaver.

She was at her best with math, physics and chemistry. I think that
was not accidental. If we list all the branches of science and art
according to their degree of accuracy, history will stand in the first
place: a documentary science, completely excluding all kinds of myths,
while at the other end will be poetry, which almost entirely consists
of myth and fiction. Nastia was not able to write poems; she needed
initial data for each problem.

On the other hand she coped wonderfully with math. Even Sasha Geim
acknowledged it when we were in the ninth form.

It happened as follows:

Once, during the long break, he announced that he had a small problem
from the repertoire of the selection board of the faculty of Physics
and Technology at the university: there was a swimming pool with four
pipes...

All the students were indignant, of course. They were bored to death
with all these swimming pools, which seemed as if made with the only
aim of getting the poor students to drown in them.

But the words selection board and faculty of Physics and Technology
aroused our interest. Igor Laubis went to the blackboard and Geim
began dictating the problem. When the first, the second and the third
pipes are open the swimming pool is filled up for 12 minutes. If the
second, the third and the fourth pipes are open - for 15 and if the
first and the fourth are open - for 20. So the question is: how long
does it take to fill the swimming pool if all the four pipes are open?

I watched Nastia. She was looking straight through Geim, and of
course she was seeing the swimming pool. Perhaps she saw the pipes,
the taps, and maybe the people sitting around the pool and waiting for
it to be filled up. Igor began writing the appropriate equations on the
blackboard, and everybody started giving his opinion, when Nastia
suddenly said:

"It is quite a small swimming pool. It will be filled up for ten minutes."

Geim looked puzzled and wondered how Nastia could know the answer.

"Look, here is the swimming pool" Nastia answered. "Here are the
concrete walls, the ladder and the two spring boards. And the pipes.
They are black and their numbers are painted in white."

"Why should the pipes be black?" Laubis interrupted. "May be they are
grey. Or orange."

"They are black with big white numbers." Nastia repeated. "That is the
way I see them, and anyway it is none of your business. The water
from pipes one, two, and three fills up one-twelfth of the swimming
pool for a minute. At the same time the pipes with numbers two, three,
and four fill one-fifteenth of it for a minute. And here again are
pipes one and four. They fill one-twentieth of the pool for a minute.
Every number is repeated twice: you can see that at once. There are
eight pipes in two sets of four. They fill up one-fifth of the pool for
a minute and the whole pool for five minutes. Therefore four pipes
need double that time. That is all."

"You should study that, my friends." Geim announced festively. "This is
logic and clarity of thought. I taught her."

Do you get the cheek of it? His student...

Many a time I was tempted to tell them everything, but I didn't dare. I
read in the psychology books that mathematical abilities are a result
of the capacity for operating with abstract conceptions. A
mathematician thinks in general terms, he classifies everything. His
thoughts go like this: that is a problem of such and such a type,
therefore we must solve it in this way, we must do this and that. And
so on. As you see - no pictures at all. Just the opposite - the
mathematical approach is based on the transition from pictures and
images to operations with abstract symbols. So it turned out that my
work with Nastia was some kind of heresy.

I tried to talk to a boy from the Teacher-training Institute. We could
not keep the conversation going. He began sniggering and I stopped
talking.

Only the books remained. I read a lot. It seemed to me that I would
find a book containing the answers to all my questions. The books
started flooding from my room. They lay on the table, on the window-
sill, on the floor. Once, when I wanted to free some more space in my
room, I took all the theatrical materials I had to my father's
bookcase.

"So you have made your final choice," my father said sadly. "It is a
pity. You could have become a good actress."

The theatre. Now I had no time left for going to previews in Rostov.
And the twenty-four hours of the day were simply not enough for me
as it was. I felt almost physically cramped.

And the experiment continued. Nastia was getting excellent marks in
math. She even entered into a regional mathematical olympiad together
with Geim. I went, too: I felt like watching these mathematicians.
Generally they all looked like Geim: their thoughts were bounded by
the same strict canons and they did not enter into the images of
"X"-es and "Y"-s. Nevertheless, Nastia was among the best until the
very end. She failed in the finals. THe problem was all about the
height of some clouds over a river. The observer stood somewhere
nearby. So Nastia was the only one who took into account the
curvature of the Earth's surface, and it turned out that this was
completely unnecessary. The jury began arguing among itself, and the
opinions were quite polarized. On one hand, the problem did not really
require such a pedantic approach. On the other hand, the observer was
standing far enough from the place in question, so that the taking
into account of the Earth's curvature added 30 centimeters to the
height.

I understood Nastia very well. There wasn't any other choice for her.
She s a w these clouds, she s a w how they were floating towards the
horizon, and of course, she was obliged to take in mind the roundness
of the Earth. In other words they decreased Nastia's mark for
complicating the problem. Personally, I think it was unjust.

Here the psychological factor played a certain role. The members of
the jury were somewhat doubtful of Nastia. You can surely imagine the
boys and girls at a mathematical olympiad: concentrated, intelligent,
radiating a pure love of math and science, quite promising in fact.
Imagine now Nastia standing next to them, a beautiful girl who looks
like a movie star and is absently gazing somewhere in space, who
solves the problems without writing anything down

Geim took the first place, Nastia was seventh, and yet we came back as
winners.

"Don't be angry," Geim tried to calm me down. "The result is not bad
for Nastia. She will work harder and will be first in the tenth form.
But if I must be honest, the spark of God is missing in her."

You see, he did not doubt that he had the spark. Such is the vanity
of infant prodigies...

"Listen, Geim," I proposed. "Let's shake hands on this - if Nastia gets
ahead of you in the next five years you will fire a volley in her
honor."

"What for... What volley?"

You can see now the deeply imbedded psychological structures. Not a
single sign of imagination!

"I will tell you how and why. there are two old guns next to Peter's
monument. You will charge them and fire. And if you win we will fire
the volley in your honor. There are two guns near Peter, three near
the museum and one next to the entrance of Shipbuilding plant. It will
be heard all over Taganrog."

This picture obviously impressed him. We signed an official agreement.

Five years... Do you know, there is an train of thought in psychology
which says that the mathematical s t u d y i n g abilities do not
guarantee mathematical c r e a t i v e abilities. Psychologists have
argued about this for about half a century. And here I was, obliged to
make up my mind. Nastia treated me as a sportsman treats his coach.
My opinion meant a lot to her. I turned over the pages of many books.
I thought a lot and decided at last: Nastia should apply for the
Faculty of Physics and Technology.

In summer we usually went to the quay. The port of Taganrog is small
and quiet. The concrete quay is a favorite place for the local
fishermen. They stood there all day long with their fishing rods, and
we sat with our textbooks. That summer I penetrated into the jungle
of psychology - the theory of intellectual operations, genetic
epistemology, factor analysis, functional molding. Nastia read
Fihtengolts' calculus and trained herself in retelling heart- breaking
stories from the personal lives of differentials and second-order
curves.

I noted down some of the things and analyzed them by the Lirmaker
method. The result was shocking: her index of fantasy was over 250.
At the same time Lirmaker writes that he has not met a person with
an index of more than 160.

Going through the technology of the analysis I checked on science
fiction, fairy-tales and myths. Only for two of the cases did the index
of fantasy reach 200. According to Lirmaker, that was the fantasy of
GENIUS.

At the end of the summer I thought of a special test. I made Nastia
write a composition on the following theme: "The fifth season of the
year." I myself tried very hard and managed to write three pages on
the subject /the index of fantasy was 106/. I used as strictly as I
could the coefficients which were available for the Lirmaker method,
yet Nastia got 290 points.

Of course, in this case the Lirmaker scale was just losing its meaning.
The quality created in Nastia was not a fantasy in the ordinary
meaning of the word. This new quality had as much in common with
simple fantasy as integral calculus has with arithmetics.

I did just one more thing this summer. I wrote a book of mathematical
problems and exercises for developing the superfantasy. All these
years I had been groping blindly: I now had a well-founded system at
last. I was clear about the ways for developing the superfantasy. I
saw the mistakes I had made. If I could begin the experiment now, I
would be able to achieve the same results for two instead of four
years.

In the tenth form Nastia had only excellent marks. Geim left for
Novosibirsk to study at a Physics and Mathematics College and Nastia
shone to perfection.

Well, yes, maybe I should mention the boys, too. The mathematical
glory plus those large eyes the color of a stormy sea had a magnetic
effect. In the beginning I was worried. I imagined different horrible
things, like what would happen if Nastia got married and didn't apply
for the Physics and Technology... It was a storm in a tea-cup.
Obviously it is not very pleasant if your love looks straight through
you and thinks of something else. So the opinion formed in the circles
that mattered was that Nastia was a crammer, dreaming only of a gold
medal.

She really got a gold medal. I hardly deserved the honorary diploma;
and anyway, everybody thought Nastia had helped me.

A medal, that was all right, but I still had some doubts. I suddenly
found out that there was an idea dominating the precise sciences
which was opposed to the very basis of my experiment. It is
considered that modern science starts where fantasy ends. The more a
scientist delves into the abstract, the further he will reach. And that
was verified by convincing examples. You just try to imagine a photon
which sometimes expresses itself as a particle, sometimes as a wave
and sometimes as a wave-particle and besides that doesn't have any
mass when at rest... The theory of relativity, quantum mechanics,
nuclear physics: every step forward meant a further separation from
the world of concrete images. That is why the role of mathematics
grew.

So it turned out that I was rowing against the tide. In order to
console myself I invented the theory of cracks: you can go forward
not only from the position of mathematical logic, but in roundabout
ways as well - there are cracks through which the imagination can go
forward.

We left for Moscow and matriculated without any difficulties: Nastia in
the Institute of Physics and Technology and I in the Faculty of
Psychology of the Moscow University. Our first appearance in the
corridors of the Institute was a great show. I was sure in Nastia and
we decided to play a trick. We dressed ourselves simply but
effectively. In that respect psychology had taught me some things.
Besides, we had began going to the quay from the early days of April
and we had a good tan. The mass of white-faced candidates was
shocked.

"Dear girls," a lanky boy with glasses turned to us. "Don't tell me that
you want to leave the Institute of Drama and join us here."

"Oh, what are you talking about, Boris?" Another intellectual broke in.
"The actresses have just come to watch for a while during the break
between the shots."

They were both from the same school, the mathematical school of
Kostilyov. They understood each other with half a word, and started
egging each other along to bolster up their own courage in the face of
the coming exams. And we led them along, too.

"Oh, the tan? We were on a holiday in Crimea. And what is so
interesting about that? People say the most important things before
an exam are fresh air and rich food..."

They enjoyed themselves for about 20 minutes. In return, we
scrutinizing their faces after the exams with great pleasure.

"You said fresh air, didn't you?" the lanky, bespectacled boy said. He
had hardily fought for the excellent marks and was all goose-flesh.
"So, fresh air and rich food, er?"

We went to live with Lidia Nickolaevna, Nastia's aunt who worked at
the Institute of Architecture. We were given a very smart room at our
disposal. It was twelve square meters and at least three of them were
occupied by stones, minerals, useful, semi-useful and simply useless
resources, all gathered by Lidia Nickolaevna's husband, who was a
geologist and was now abroad. There were stones on the window still,
on the shelves and on the floor. The sofa, given to me, stood on four
big pieces of semi-transparent fluorite. We dusted the stones for two
whole days, and we made the mineral kingdom glitter. Then we spread
out the stones again. We put an enormous piece of golden pyrite on the
table. Lidia Nickolaevna said the stones suited the interior very well.

Of course, it wouldn't have been bad if the number of stones had
decreased and the interior had increased. However, I did not want to
go to a boarding-house before finishing the experiment.

Now I was faced with a serious problem which often kept me awake at
night. I had yet to see Nastia make an invention or a discovery by
herself. And on one hand, I couldn't require any inventions from her
for the first couple of years or so. On the other hand I could not
wait five or ten years; it did not suit me at all.

I was getting angry, but I could not change anything. Nastia had to
study. I too. We needed a long time for additional subjects: I composed
individual programs for two years ahead. Besides that there was
sport: four times weekly we went to the swimming pool. And there was
Moscow, too, with its theatres, concerts, galleries, museums and
countless squares and streets, which you just had to see.

I walked a lot. I liked walking in the streets of the big city, watching
the passers-by, the houses, the shop windows, and thinking. Once (it
happened at the end of the winter) I entered the underground to warm
myself and saw some little children with a supervisor who were going
up on the opposite lift. It was a group from a kindergarten. It was
hard to imagine where they were going in such cold weather.

"Twenty six persons," somebody said behind my back. "Two football
teams together with the reserves. A fresh generation is growing."

"That's right," another voice mockingly replied. "Today they have
equal chances and then some of them will become captains and others
will sit on the bench during the whole match, as a reserve..."

I wanted to turn back, for suddenly, for a fraction of a second a
thought had appeared in my head, a thought that I had been expecting
during all these years. I was clear about what I should do further. I
saw a picture, and the experiment with Nastia was only one of the
episodes.

The train went away, the platform was deserted and I stood looking at
the rails, with my heart beating as though I had run to exhaustion.

From that day on I began preparing for my next experiment. Time was
in short supply. I felt as if the hours flew at a faster-than-light
speed. That first year in Moscow passed too quickly.

In the summer, when the exams were over, I got a job for Nastia as a
lab assistant at the Institute of Technical Cybernetics. I hoped that
Nastia would have a chance to show her abilities there. And a chance
there really was, although not everything went the way I foresaw it.
Nastia came back from her first working day in high spirits, she
carelessly gulped down the cordon-bleu dinner I had prepared under
the supervision of Lidia Nickolaevna, and she spent the whole evening
telling me about the problems of the bionics lab. The group in which
Nastia worked dealt with the problem of image-recognition. I knew
about the general aspects of the problem, as it had a bearing on
psychology, too.

Let's take a letter, the letter A, for example. It may be in many
different forms: written, printed, uppercase or lowercase, but you can
always easily define which that letter is. It may be sloped, overturned
or embellished in some complicated design; that doesn't matter, as you
can see and recognize the letter A. Our brain has the capacity to find
the lowest common denominator and to leave out the unessential
details. Therefore there are such methods with the help of which the
brain recognizes visual images. In order to teach the computer how to
recognize images, and without that it can neither write nor see, new
methods for recognition have to be invented - that is one of the more
important tasks of bionics.

Nastia's lab experimented with a perseptron. This is an electronic
machine specially constructed for recognizing images. They showed the
perseptron a series of geographic maps and the machine found out two
equal pictures among hundreds of more or less identical ones. Nastia
made us believe that the perseptron was a sheer miracle.

Here she became silent and started looking at the stones in the corner
of the room. By her eyes, in which stormy clouds had began gathering,
I realized that things were quite serious.

Nastia had got an idea.

I felt like kissing her, but I held back my excitement because of
psychological considerations. Everything should be discussed in a
business-like way.

The idea was really great.

Show the perseptron different pictures of one and the same person,
then make the machine take out the most characteristic features and
you will have a g e n e r a l i z e d portrait.

No matter how good a photographer is, he cannot take a picture of a
generalized image. Only artists can do a generalization. But art, in
contrast to photography, is not documentary. If the idea proved to
have merit, the perseptron would make the connection between the
concreteness and accuracy of the photo art and the artistic
generalization which is typical for art. And then we are only a step
away from a new, synthetical kind of art - photopainting.

We did not go to bed till very late that night. We talked the idea
over a thousand times. We never imagined how things would change.
That was my fault. I should have foreseen the possible complications.

Next morning, after sending Nastia off to work, I went to the library.
That day I did not feel at all like concentrating; my thoughts were
occupied with Nastia, the perseptron and the future of photopainting.
When I returned home I found Nastia crying. A suitcase was opened on
the bed and Nastia, swallowing her tears, was packing it. I worked
very hard in order to get some information about what had happened.

Early in the morning Nastia told her boss, Yurochka the programmer,
about her idea. She called him "boss" and looked at him with those
eyes the color of a stormy sea. Yurochka, of course, was completely
bowled over. He only muttered "Quite an intoxicating idea!" and went
to the chief of the group, the bearded Vova. This fellow frowned and
mumbled something at first, but Yurochka pointed out an irrefutable
reason, reminding him that they had enough material for the
perseptron to work on, as the anniversary committee was just
preparing an album and had gathered about 150 photos for the
anniversary of P. P. Pihtin, who was a senior research worker in the
economics department. And as their lab was being blamed for taking
quite a passive stand towards these preparations, they could now
contribute the first in the world photopainted portrait. Vova
scratched his beard and agreed.

They began discussing the details. It soon became clear that they
could very easily check on some of the controversial material which
had recently appeared in an article published by the Kiev bionists
from the Stognia group.

"There was such an enthusiasm!" Nastia wailed, rubbing her tears out.
"Nothing could stop them any more..."

The preparations for the experiment took them three hours, as they
had to reset the photo-block. They lost twenty more minutes for
treating the new photopainted picture. It was ready just before lunch.
By then, of course, everybody knew about picture and a lot of people
from different labs and departments had gathered together around the
perseptron. The first appearance of the photopicture was noisily
congratulated. The portrait was bright, and Pihtin looked unusual, but
at the same time extremely real. Yurochka, giving out explanations,
emphasized that the lab had realized an idea of its new assistant.
Everybody liked the idea, the new assistant liked it too.

Pavel Ivanovich Pihtin came, examined the portrait and murmured:
"Hum, it is quite curious..."

They hung the enlarged picture in the lounge next to the
announcement for the anniversary celebrations. And the problems
started from here. They could not understand the reason why -
perhaps the lights in the lounge were different or the enlargement
had some effect, but in any case something changed at once. Nastia
thought it was the time factor.

Anyhow, everybody soon noticed that Pihtin looked somehow unusual in
the picture. For example the fashionable glasses were missing. And the
intelligent expression had disappeared with the glasses. Something had
changed in the lines around the eyes and the thin taut lips. The
perseptron did what only a talented portrait artist could do. It had
left out all the extraneous things. The changes were almost
imperceptible. But it was the r e a l Pihtin who was on the portrait. A
person who was not very clever, but was trying to look intelligent
and imposing. A person who was not very good, but had a kind smile.

"He was without any make-up." Nastia said. "Perhaps he looks like that
only when he is alone."

An uneasy silence fell in the lounge. And then everybody went to his
room. Phillipev, the usually quiet and taciturn engineer, tried to
convince them it was their fault. They should have found another
person. Pihtin's career had began in the old days with an article
which denounced the followers of that bourgeois pseudo-science of
cybernetics. Phillipev reminded them of some other episodes and
foresaw that Pihtin would not be clever enough to accept the story
with the portrait from its funny side. The prediction came true: a
telephone call followed.

Yurochka and the bearded Vova took the hit heroically. An exile was
enough to satisfy the powers that be. They sent Nastia on a business
trip. The decision was pure genius. The lab and Nastia were punished.
And the lab and Nastia could consider that there had been no
punishment at all, as Nastia was leaving for a resort on the Black Sea
coast of Crimea.

They drank a bottle of tomato juice on that, the bearded Vova
expressed the conviction of all his colleagues that a brilliant future
was waiting for the new lab assistant, because creating such a tempest
on your second day of work was a gift very few had.

"Well, what is it then?" I asked. "As far as I can see everything went
OK?"

Nastia shook her head, sobbing.

"I have to go to the dolphin base and there are neither dolphins nor a
base. The construction of the base will begin not earlier than
September. It is much more interesting in the lab."

On the next day I went to the Institute. I talked to the bearded Vova.
I listened to Yurochka, who swore that he would continue working on
the photopaintings. I went to see the director. Nothing could be
changed: the director of the Institute was adamant. But I managed to
get hired as a lab assistant too, and to be sent to the Crimea
together with Nastia.

"Well, it is certain that there are no dolphins at the base." The
bearded Vova said thoughtfully after examining my application." The
dolphins are now romping in the sea. But bearing in mind the
supernatural abilities of Nastia Sergeevna, it won't be very difficult
for her to explain Grey's paradox, for example, even without a
dolphin."

I asked him what Grey's paradox was. Vova sighed, read my application
once again and diffidently proposed that we continue our conversation
on Grey's paradox after working hours. I kindly refused. "I think I
remember something about the paradox," I said, and that was a lie, as
I couldn't remember anything because I had never known anything.
"Very probably you are right. Grey's paradox can be resolved without
dolphins. We shall get down to it."

"Well, yes, yes," Vova mumbled, scratching his beard. He was confused
by my insolence. "Get down to it. Do get down. Mankind is waiting."

Two days later we arrived in Adler. After the boring Moscow rains we
fell into the blinding rays of the sun. The concrete plates of the
airport emanated hot air. We felt that being exiled was not too bad.

Forty minutes later the bus had taken us to the dolphin base. Here my
excitement abated, just a little bit. The place, you see, was a tourist
paradise: a steep coast, a golden beach, rocks, blue sea and the
delicate whisper of the waves. Four hundred meters of waterfront
beauty! And on these four hundred meters there were a few dirty
prefabricated storehouses. Heaps of carelessly strewn bricks and bags
full of cement lay under the shelters and in the center of it all a
classical shanty of indeterminate color, indeterminate form, and built
of indeterminate material stood.

A web of nets was pitched around the shanty. Among the nets a
red-haired dog jumped and gaily whinnied.

"This dog is a genius!" Nastia said. "It recognized at once that we are
assistants at the Institute of Technical Cybernetics."

We climbed down the hill and accompanied by the genius navigated
through the labyrinth of nets until we got to the shanty. Near the
entrance we saw a small, bald-headed old man who was sleeping on a
camp-bed. On his chest there was an old book with almost torn-out
covers. The dog quietly barked and the old man opened his eyes and
sat up on the bed. The book fell on the ground and I lifted it. Its
title was "Basics of Esperanto".

"Mi estas gardisto!" He said with joy. "And who are you? Qio vi estas?"

In ten minutes' time we were brought up-to-date on the situation. The
base really existed, but only on blue-prints. Up to now there was only
a territory where building materials and a part of the equipment were
stored. The word "territory" the guard pronounced in Esperanto and it
sounded very grand indeed: "territorio". To the south of the
territorio was the rich and flourishing research base of the Institute
of Hydrology, to the north there was a scree, and there were no
other buildings besides the shanty. And, according to the guard,
camarado Torgevskii was obliged to take care of us. He was the chief,
responsible both for the territorio and the materials on it.

"Camarado Torgevskii... how was it... li estas sadga homo." The guard
explained. "He is a clever man, I say."

"But how is that possible?" I asked. "Do all the nouns in Esperanto
finish with an 'o'?"

"All!" The educated grandpa confirmed with joy and pointed at the dog.
"Hundo. And its name is Tresoro. That means 'treasure'."

The guard, esperantist Grigory Semionovich Shemet, turned out to be a
very amusing person. He was a master watchmaker and had lived in
Novgorod for half a century without moving. He lived in the same
place all that time, and he worked in the same workshop. His life
passed smoothly and rhythmically, just like a stop-watch. And then,
quite unexpectedly for his numerous relatives, Grigory Semionovich
escaped to Arhangelsk and began working at a fishermens' cooperative.
Suddenly an irresistible passion had appeared in him towards the sea,
an urge to see new places, to live a wanderer's care-free life in the
open air. They found the fugitive and made him come back. But he
escaped again - this time to the sea of Ohotsk. The relatives gave up:
they decided to let him go every spring. He toured around the
country, "lavgonge kai lavlarde", (which means the length and width),
fished in eight seas and was now collecting money for a tour of Europe
by sea.

Grandpa was incredibly vigorous. While telling us the story of his life
he quickly made the bed, invited us into his cottage and prepared tea.
The cottage was very neat, very pleasant and cool, and the raw floor
boards smelled of resin. I wondered how Grigory Semeonovich had been
able to stay in a watchmaker's workshop for years on end. I can
hardly imagine it still.

"And what is the Esperanto for?"

The old man slapped his hands.

"Oh, in Europe, you know, it is full of different peoples. Well, I can not
learn all the languages. I will not be able to do it until the departure.
And then, my dear belulino, which means beauties, Esperanto does not
only sound fine, but it is inventive and at the same time strict. Here,
for an example I will recite to you the poem "A boat", by Lermontov,
translated into Esperanto."

But the poem did not get recited because camarado Torgevskii turned
up. He arrived in a new grey Volga, followed by a caravan of three
lorries loaded with bricks.

Camarado Torgevskii was fine. He looked as if he had come out of an
ad for the modern manager. The Esperanto guard was right. Torgevskii
turned out to be a clever businessman.

"You are friends," he said. "You should not look at my suit and my new
Volga that way. They are not a luxury, but a necessity for the modern
manager. If it was not for them... Who would give me plates and cables
if I was in my crumpled shirt? And as you are sent to help me, you
must watch me and learn how to do it. The contact with our brothers,
the dolphins, depends on us. If there isn't an equipped base there
won't be a contact either."

We assured Torggevskii that we would do our best to speed up the
contact with our brothers, the dolphins.

"That's all right," Torgevskii agreed. "Our brothers, the dolphins, will
be pleased. And now direct your efforts, please, to unloading the
bricks. These gangsters called loaders throw the bricks as if they are
made of steel. And a brick is not steel, it can easily be broken. Well,
and then we shall look for a tent and some sleeping bags."

So our life in exile started.

There was much work. We met loads of equipment, supplied the
transport, oversaw the unloading, and often even worked hard during
the unloading. Torgevskii offered us the rough prose of logistics,
leaving for himself the gentle lyrics of supply. He often travelled, he
held some super-secret negotiations as a result of which our
storehouses filled up with Finnish decorating panels, air conditioners,
and ultra-modern shelves for the yet nonexistent bookcases.

A week had passed before I remembered about Grey's paradox.

"What is that?" Nastia angrily said. At that moment she was examining
the tip of her nose in the mirror. "Listen, what do you think? Will my
nose get sun-burned, eh? We should get a supply of sun-tan lotion, at
any rate (she would have said "buy" before we came here). And nothing
will come out of Grey's paradox. You can not even imagine what it
means."

But Nastia was wrong: after my conversation with the bearded Vova I
had ran to the library and had managed to turn over a few pages: the
works of Kramer, Aleev, Pershin, and some others.

The discrepancy between the speed of the dolphins and the power of
their muscular system - that was Grey's paradox. Dolphins swim at a
speed of up to 60 kilometers per hour. Their musculature should be
ten times stronger than it really is. Some time ago it was considered
that Kramer had succeeded in resolving the paradox. The hard body of
a ship cuts smoothly through the water only when the temperatures
are low. Increasing the speed stratifies the water stream so that
turbulent whirls form in it and the resistance increases a lot. So
Kramer suggested that the skin of the dolphins quite flexibly adapts
to the speed of the water, thus preventing the formation of a
turbulence. Springy damping coats were invented and used and they
did to a certain extent prevent the forming of turbulences. But Grey's
paradox remained - the damping effect explained only a part of it.
There had to be another, more efficient method for decreasing the
resistance.

"Think a little before you let your mouth run off on you!" Nastia
indignantly said. "How can we get down to Grey's paradox when we
have neither the equipment nor the dolphins for it?!"

"But that is what is really interesting. Imagine what a hit it will be:
to guess the secret of the dolphins without studying a single
dolphin..." I objected.

I had to convince her for a long time. This was the first time when
Nastia did not even want to try to solve a problem. According to her,
the idea was a total joke: studying the dolphins without seeing any. I
convinced her by a pure fluke.

"Think logically," I said. You always have to call logic to your side,
especially when there is no reason whatsoever in your words or
actions. "Think logically. The other research workers have had
dolphins, but they have not achieved anything. You have no dolphins.
Therefore you will achieve something."

"Well said! Are you sure you feel all right?" Nastia felt indignant.
"That is a load of rubbish..."

She suddenly stopped and gazed at me. She looked at me with those
eyes the color of a stormy sea and I understood that the things would
yet go well.

"So you think we must study dolphins without really having any, don't
you?" Nastia asked in a rather different voice.

What else could I do? I felt I was talking nonsense, but still, I
repeated:

"If we think logically, it is exactly the presence of dolphins which is
to be blamed. Other research workers have had dolphins, but the
paradox has remained unsolved. You have no dolphins, so you will solve
the paradox."

"Yes, certainly," mumbled Nastia, looking through me.

In half an hour she uttered: "Well, and what about the steel? Today it
will arrive at the station, and we must arrange for lorries and a
crane."

I said I would do everything alone. Let her occupy herself only with
the dolphins. That is, not the dolphins, but rather their absence. Not
an absence which is just non-presence, but one which gives more than
a presence. This was a real pipe-dream, but just to push her still a
little bit harder I resorted again to the magic word "logical".

Anyway, Nastia wasn't listening to me. She absent-mindedly said "I see"
and started for the sea.

I ran around like crazy all day long with that steel. And all that time
Nastia lay on the boards and looked at the sea. I brought her milk
and biscuits, as I had no time to prepare a lunch.

From this day onwards I did the work of two. I did not allow Nastia to
think about anything else. Let her think. The only thing I couldn't
understand was what she could imagine in this case. OK, here is the
sea and the dolphins are swimming in it. And further?... Once I even
dreamt that same thing. A dolphin smiled sadly and said in
Torgevskii's voice:

"You needn't look at me like that!"

In a couple of days Nastia had grown thinner from all the thinking. On
the third day she gave me a list of books she needed. The list did not
explain anything. All the books concerned the theory of catalysis.
Catalysts, as you know, can speed up a chemical reaction, but what did
that have to do with the speed of the dolphins? Well, what else could I
do? I went to Sochi and found the books.

Then Nastia gave me another list: chemicals, laboratory utensils and
equipment for chromatographic analysis. That was easier: I went to our
neighbors, the hydrologists, and begged. We put up another tent. Now
Nastia had her own laboratory.

"If you come to the stage where you need dolphins," I said to Nastia,
"please inform me in advance. We shall have to equip a ship."

"Dolphins?" Nastia asked. "No, I don't need any dolphins."

On the following morning the Gale of the Eight seas told me:

"Listen now, belulino. Post laboro venas riposo. This means, you see,
that you must have a rest, you mustn't only work and work. And you
have only laboro and no riposo. Nastia is getting too slim from all
this milk. Only skin and bones. Today there will be fish soup; you
must be here at five."

I came back at 9 o'clock. I was hungry and angry. A tape recorder
loudly played and the bearded hydrologists were having a lot of fun
around the guard's shanty: they were teaching the old man to rock.
There was no soup, of course. I had been sure of that from the moment
I saw them. They had eaten my soup, they had tried to turn Nastia's
mind away from the dolphins, and they had made grandpa's head spin. I
chased them away as fast as I could. Dinner was awful: wine, apples,
biscuits and a hard like stone yellow cheese.

My head was buzzing from the wine and the fatigue. I did not pay any
attention to Nastia's words.

"Do you know that tomorrow we shall experiment?"

We had already slipped into our sleeping bags. I mechanically repeated:

"Yeah, tomorrow."

And then I realized.

"We shall experiment!!!"

"Tell me what we shall test." I asked. "What are you talking about?"

"Tomorrow we will swim. If everything is all right, tomorrow we, me
and you, will break the world records. Now sleep. By the way, that
fellow Alyosha is very nice, did you notice? The tall one with the
moustache. He is from Rostov, which means that we are practically
neighbors."

I did not feel like sleeping any more. And how could I, if Nastia had
solved the problem!

"OK, I will explain, there's no need to shout," Nastia gave in
unwillingly. "Well, there is nothing to explain really, everything is too
simple. You told me that it was easier to understand these things
without dolphins, didn't you? And so I imagined a sea, then a dolphin,
and then I put this dolphin away. Do you understand?"

I did not understand anything. A dolphin is swimming: that I can easily
imagine. But what will remain if we put it away?

"The sea!" Nastia was bored. "How can't you see it? It is quite logical,
you said so yourself. Some water will remain, so we should think only
of water. And no dolphins. You must imagine water, is that clear?"

I tried to guess.

"Molecules of water?"

"No, this is the main thing: there are no molecules. If there were
molecules in the water it would boil at -80 degrees centigrade. The
molecules of water are united in groups and aggregates. That is why
water is fluid. But now imagine an ice-cube and its crystal structure.
An enormous crystal: like a warehouse at a loading station. And when
the ice melts, the crystal dissociates into aggregates. Instead of the
warehouse imagine now some boxes, OK? And imagine there are balls,
for example, in the boxes. They are generally mobile. You can easily
move them, but the packing stands in your way. The same situation
holds true in the case of the water molecules. They are restricted by
the boundaries of these aggregates like the balls in the boxes. All the
properties of water depend on this. That is the reason for the
resistance of the water to any movement. Try to move the balls while
they are in the boxes! And I thought further as follows: we have to
break the aggregates into separate molecules, then the viscosity of
the water will suddenly decrease. Perhaps that is how the dolphins..."

Wait a minute," I interrupted her. I was not interested in the dolphins
now. "How do we do that? How do we break down these poor
aggregates?"

Nastia snorted in contempt.

"You brought me some books, didn't you? Again logic comes to our help:
somewhere, somebody had to have solved a similar problem. Water is a
substance found everywhere... In other words, I found out that
biochemists were interested in the problem of breaking down
aggregates. I am quite sure they have never suspected that this was
the way towards the decreasing of the viscosity of water. The
aggregate molecules simply take part in the energy processes of the
organism. If you wish you may see the books tomorrow. The important
thing is: when an additional proton joins the aggregate then it
suddenly breaks into separate molecules. Like a house of cards. Do you
understand? After that I only had to find a substance which would
easily give off protons. Tomorrow you will try it yourself. I took
"Moon" lotion as a base. After all, we are not ships, to smear ourselves
with all kinds of repulsive things. Oh, I want to sleep now. Leave me."

"Sleep then!" I said angrily. "You can't even imagine what you have
done. And all your reasoning is just a snow bridge over the abyss of
ignorance. A swimming snow bridge."

"What did you say?" Nastia was astonished. "A snow bridge over the
abyss? Oh, how wonderful! I can see this bridge!"

She kept silent for a while, examining her snow bridge, and then
asked:

"Listen, Kira, is that poetry?"

"No, it's prose. That was how Karl Pearson determined the law of
Gregor Mendel about heredity."

"But Mendel was right, wasn't he? And this is just wonderful: a snow
bridge over the abyss."

I made it more precise:

"Over the abyss of ignorance."

"Well, and what of that? The most important thing is not to fall down."

"No," I thought, "the main thing is to decide to step on the snow
bridge. Not to wait for the building of ferroconcrete pillars, but to
find a narrow snow track and... dare to do it."

It was very strange: I slept like a log that night. In the morning an
incredibly delicious smell woke me up - the old man and Nastia were
frying potatoes. I hoped the day would be a lucky one.

After breakfast Nastia gave me a box of greenish cream. "Please, do
your best," Nastia said. "You will be my dolphin."

The old man helped us measure a hundred meters along the shore. We
didn't have a stop-watch and they clocked me with my own wristwatch.

"Well, girls, ready?" The Gale of the Eight Seas asked. "Wait for my
command."

The cream was cool, the water was cool too. I stood on a slippery
stone and the old man, Nastia and hundo Tresoro looked at me from
the shore.

"A snow bridge," I thought. "If it could only hold me..."

I felt I swam very well. Such a felling does not come to a person very
often: you feel as if you are flying and meeting no resistance at all.
And I didn't tire; I continuously increasing my speed during these
hundred meters.

"Forty eight seconds!" Nastia shouted from the coast. "We are not
afraid of a snow bridge, snow bridge, snow bridge..."

The world record for men was 52 seconds. I knew it well. And even if
Nastia had made a mistake, I had still broken the world record, give
or take a second or two.

"Let's take the water nymphs, for example." The old man said. "They
are girls after all, they are not men. People say this. Girls are
obliged to swim better. Or if we take the phantoms..."

"Stop it, grandpa!" Nastia interrupted him. "The phantoms are from
another play. Come on, Kira, swim another hundred meters on your
back."

The world record for that was 1 minute and 6 seconds. I broke that
record as well. Now I really felt the speed.

"Kvindek, sep, oh, my God!" Grandpa enthusiastically shouted. "Fifty
seven seconds! You flew like a bird."

That day all the problems of supply were forgotten. We swam and
wrote down the results. At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon we had
bettered all the olympic and world records. Even in the eight hundred
meters mixed style I could win a silver medal and Nastia a bronze. The
cream had finished, otherwise we would have tried for the gold.

Then I was happy and tired and lay on the heated sand. I watched
Nastia and grandpa while they prepared a special dinner. My head was
dizzy and when I closed my eyes the earth began to swing around me.

"Oh, if only there was some cool lemonade..." The old guard sighed.
"You girls are always afraid of swallowing some spare calories, you
keep your waists slender. But for me calories are not dangerous. My
body has grown used to them."

The Gale of the Eight Seas was up to his tricks, which I very well
understood. He wanted Nastia to go and bring him some beer from the
hydrologists.

"Don't beat around the bush, old man," I said. "There will be beer
tonight. But for now we must keep our heads clear. We have a problem:
how do we call our discovery? The name must be short and melodious.
Come on, think of it."

"Oh, I only wish I had your troubles." The old man pretends to be
angry. Obviously he feels flattered. "Call it that way: an impetuous
meteor sailing on the "Anastasia Caricheva"."

Why not? There was some sense in it. The Anastasia Caricheva effect.
The AC effect. Oh, how the earth shakes! The broken aggregates are
quickly restored, otherwise the water after us would boil without any
consumption of energy. Yes, it is clear that the breaking and the
restoring of the aggregates is only done in a thin layer. Well, and
what of it? There is nothing to prevent the use of the AC effect in
high-speed ships. "Listen, Nastia, today I shall send a telegram to
Geim. And to the bearded Vova."

"No, it is better to ring up Geim. He is now in Taganrog. As for Vova,
he can wait for a while. I am not yet sure about all of it."

Nastia told the Gale of The Eight Seas about Geim and the artillery
volley with the two guns. No, two guns are not enough. If Geim has a
conscience, he will organize a volley with five guns. The AC effect is
necessary not only for ships. Water is the blood of our civilization. It
is everywhere: in the pipe-lines, hydrosystems, turbines...

"But that is a great lie with the guns." The grandpa smiled. "I want to
tell you that there is no reason to raise such a hullabaloo - you must
keep this a secret. Do you understand? Not a word! A secret! And you
will become famous with your records. In all the championships and
competitions. Your photos will be in all the magazines. And I will go
around with you. I will see the world."

"All right, Kira, let's do it" Nastia entered into the spirit of the
thing. "Grigory Semeonovich has given us a tremendous idea. There are
no regulations which forbid the use of a body-lotion. Can you imagine
what will happen if we do it!"

They had a good time for a while, noisily discussing our future
careers in sports. I overheard only scraps of the conversation, as I
was shivering, electrified by a crazy thought: What would happen if
we applied the AC effect on our cardiovascular system.

"Do ni comentsu." The Gale of the Eight Seas announced at last. "Let's
stop chattering, the food is ready. Oh, what an occasion and without a
single bottle of beer! One can get quite angry with you... Wash out the
sand from your hair, I say, and quickly to lunch. Hurry up!"

Yes, we must be in a hurry. I lost a lot of time waiting for the
experiment with Nastia to give some hopeful results. That is why now
I can go forward confidently.

Confidently?

A new experiment - a new abyss. And what an abyss!

Let it be so. I shall discover the snow bridge, I shall discover it for
sure, I am not afraid to step on it.

Wait for me, snow bridge!

Here ends of the first story about the life and research of Kira
Vladimirovna Safrai. 