Time Jumps. The Paradigm of Immortality

CHAPTER 1. A STRANGE FIND

It was a very hot summer in St. Petersburg that year. Yes, yes, it all started with the heat. The heat turned out to be a trigger, a trigger in this chain of amazing events that happened to Pyotr Mikhailovich Kalinkin. Pyotr Mikhailovich was tired of the noise and blue smoke of cars, the crush in traffic jams on the streets and in shops where carts with goods do not comply with traffic rules, and there are no traffic lights. Bedlam, that’s all! He returned home with my purchases and from the threshold to his wife:

– That’s it, damn it, I can’t stay in the city anymore. Let’s go to nature tomorrow!

– And where are we going to sing? – wiping the plate with a long towel draped over her shoulder, Galina Sergeevna asked.

– How to go somewhere – to the Karelian Isthmus, to the lakes! We will stay at the hotel for a week, rest, change the situation. Then maybe we’ll look at a country house…

That’s what he gave out so fateful or unwittingly anticipated? Even in a terrible dream, a peaceful foray into nature does not evoke the idea of an abyss, but in life – what the hell is not joking when God is asleep…

Who knows how much a token is in the subway, he definitely saw Pyotr Mikhailovich – there are at least a dozen of them in one car. Hello to you, but here he is sitting opposite: a shabby black jacket, jeans made of stiff blue fabric, worn shoes and a BMW cap on his gray head. And next to her is a prim lady with stern eyes and a cap of dyed hair, in a gray raincoat, with a black bag and thick – soled shoes – Kalinkina Galina Sergeevna. In the evening, the Kalinkins will definitely stick on the telly: movies about animals and talk shows of naked tits are informative and fun, especially when you feel a certain similarity with the characters. The neighbor from above is sure that Pyotr Mikhailovich is a positive person with a touching weakness: more madly than his wife, he loves his rare “Lada” of pale green color, securely stored for forty years in the city parking lot under a high – voltage line, just five tram stops from home.

In the morning, Pyotr Mikhailovich solemnly rolled his four-wheeled friend out of the garage and soon was slowly steering along the ring road, proudly ignoring the Toyota and Mercedes cars overtaking him. Two hours later, the couple reached the hotel “Rautu” in the center of the village of Sosnovo. From the windows of the hotel room, behind the guest parking lot, a picturesque lake could be seen pleasing the eye. A herd of white goats grazed on the shore, grazing grass, evoking thoughts of fresh milk and a healthy lifestyle.

A week of rest in the countryside flew like a voucher over Russia – easily and serenely, without financial problems. The black cat did not run across the road, the women did not wander around with empty buckets, however, the midges in the forest had a bite – that was, that was. The Kalinkins wandered through the meadows, went to Ladoga and swam in Razdolinsky Lake, the water turned out to be very cool. But the greatest pleasure was the clean air, filled with the smell of herbs and pine needles, which was inhaled like a fragrant balm. Somehow Pyotr Mikhailovich decided to go fishing, but he did not grab spinning from the city in a hurry, admired the water surface at sunset and decided: it’s time to buy a cottage in these parts – a pension is on the horizon. He shared this idea with his wife.

– We will start a small farm, a vegetable garden, we will plant flowers, – Galina Sergeevna supported her husband, and in her dreams she already imagined an idyllic picture of peace in nature: a warm breeze blows, butterflies flutter over broken flower beds, and bright red sides of ripe berries peek out from green strawberry bushes and cheerfully shine in the sun… So it almost came out, but only almost.

Buying real estate is a troublesome business. Cheap offers, as well as money from the Kalinkins, were sparse, and these options were not particularly tempting: they examined old, dilapidated buildings near paved roads with a continuous flow of cars, visited a couple of semi-abandoned unfinished buildings remote from civilization in the middle of forests and fields, without water and electricity. Everything they had seen did not correspond to their ideas of suburban happiness, but the desire to breathe ozone away from the metropolis was so irresistible that after weighing all the pros and cons, the couple unanimously came to one optimal solution, in their opinion. No wonder – the wrong choice always seems more reasonable: a feasible budget for quarter acre of land with an old house in a small village, but with a well and a bathhouse, and a shop and a pharmacy nearby is an ideal option for a quiet and peaceful life of a pensioner. A woodshed with a supply of logs, rotten boards and poles, and a simple carpenter’s tool: an axe, a saw, a box with nails, a blunt scythe and sawhorses, has been preserved on a plot fenced with a dilapidated fence. But the main quarter acre of land value is a five – wall pre – war building, chopped from thick, with deep cracks, logs (as the former hostess assured – from mahogany), six by six meters, with a partition inside. According to the Kalinkins, the house has passed the test of time and met the classical canons, unlike neighboring buildings made of timber or concrete blocks. The interior was divided into a room and a kitchen of equal size, and a wood-burning stove with a stove was built into the partition and formed a single unit with it. The roof made of roofing material from antiquity and the pranks of the wind led a little sideways, the usual porch was missing from the outside, a five-step staircase replacing it was placed behind the front door and led into the vestibule with a wide window. In the hall and in the attic there was a suspicious smell of all sorts of junk, honestly warning about future problems and even evoking thoughts of terrible secrets and ancestors who had left this world.

When they rolled up their sleeves, the most urgent things were heat and water. After the sinking of the aspen, Pyotr Mikhailovich brought the stove back to life, and later they cleaned the well together – there is no way to manage it alone. Work on the ground also took a lot of effort. But in the evening, tired and tanned new settlers, sitting on the lawn at a small wooden table, could enjoy the croaking of crows and admire how the tired June luminary falls behind the tops of fir trees from the nearby forest.

Finally the owner got to the pantry. Pyotr Mikhailovich was not at all surprised when, among all the useless goods – leaky dishes, rusty buckets, torn sweatshirts and worn shoes – he found something strange: a metal barrel with four supports, a little more than a meter high. The barrel was sitting in ambush at the far corner and waiting for the victim. Pyotr Mikhailovich tried to move it from its place, but unsuccessfully – the design turned out to be very weighty. The grandfather called the grandmother, and the two of them, with difficulty, rolling on the floor, pulled this “turnip” closer to the window, into the light of God, and left it there. For a long time that evening, the puzzled Pyotr Mikhailovich could not sleep, an inquisitive mind put forward one assumption after another:

– What kind of piece of iron? It doesn’t look like a stove, it’s too heavy for a moonshine machine, no less than a pood. Maybe a the witch’s barrel?

In favor of the latter version, there was a broken broom and a battered piece of red silk suspiciously resembling a female headdress, with a strongly faded yellow inscription: “Excellent student of the socialist competition.” At the thought of all sorts of devilry, Pyotr Mikhailovich stirred uneasily on the mattress and accidentally woke up Galina Sergeevna snoring in her sleep.

– Eh? What? What don’t I have? – she mumbled sleepily, but her husband calmed her down:

– Sleep, sleep – you have everything!

– It would be necessary to dig two more beds at the fence, and plant onions with garlic, – Galina Sergeevna changed the record on the machine, and again fell asleep.

Curiosity turned out to be the last link in the chain of causes of future shocks. Pyotr Mikhailovich would have left this scrap metal alone, if he hadn’t woken up famously, and he wouldn’t have known grief. However, he stuck his nose where he shouldn’t have, and the next morning, like a bayonet, he was already standing next to the mysterious object. The design turned out to be girded either with hoops, or with stiffeners. Pyotr Mikhailovich strained, even slightly, sorry, farted in his pants from the strain. There is no doubt: fate has already sounded the alarm and buzzed him for the last time: come to your senses, old man! – however, he did not listen, lifted the barrel and set it vertically on the supports.

– Yes, twenty kilograms, barely, – after catching his breath, he confirmed his night assumptions. The find had to be wiped off with dust and dirt rags. Upon careful inspection, closer to the short legs, a hinged door the size of a good tablet was found. The door was locked with an internal lock, and the researcher had to tinker a lot before opening it with a key from the motorist’s kit. Opening the door with a creak, to his surprise he saw inside a flat area with a socket for batteries – for standard batteries, six pieces. There were none at hand, so he had to visit a local store after breakfast.

In a small rural supermarket, the assortment turned out to be surprisingly rich: they sold everything except anti-aircraft complexes and marijuana. A young saleswoman offered several brands of batteries, and Pyotr Mikhailovich chose “Duracel” – once seen on TV advertising about hares-rabbits still worked. And was it worth saving fifty rubles in this mysterious case? After thinking a little, at the same time he took a brick of local baked bread, a bottle of Stolichnaya and pickled cucumbers: he need to arrange a festive dinner with Galya in the evening in nature, they deserved it…

Returning to the house, Kalinkin shoved a bag of provisions to his wife, and he ran to the barrel – that’s what she clung to, damn it! Impatiently, he opened the package, installed the batteries in the contacts. And… nothing happened. The device remained dead, apparently, it’s not about the batteries. And Pyotr Mikhailovich hoped so, although it is not clear to himself why, and mentally scolded himself for naivety:

– He lived to gray hair, but his mind is like a child’s…

In the evening, the couple, being wary of Windows, played cards. After three glasses of vodka, Pyotr Mikhailovich’s skill definitely increased, but the buttle went only to the second level: the stubborn thought of a mysterious find, nesting somewhere in the depths of his brain, interfered. After being fooled a couple of times, he silently threw down the cards and left the room. It was she, this thought, who brought him back to the hall. Approaching the iron barrel, he angrily slammed the door. The door suddenly clicked and closed with an internal lock. After a few seconds, a strange vibrating sound appeared from somewhere, from which the heart of the pre-pensioner lost its rhythm, began to pound unusually loudly, and the ears suddenly began to lay, as in an airplane when landing. To the astonishment of the astonished Mikhailovich, the old iron barrel with legs began to lose shape, shrank and gradually melted into the air, and instead, as if out of nowhere, a small ball formed. The balloon filled with gas, grew before our eyes, and then turned by itself into a kind of simulator: a comfortable, large chair with a hood and a screen on a wide stand resting on a square base. When the simulator took its final shape, the strange sound faded away, and the inexplicable anxiety in Kalinkin’s soul disappeared. The string of transformations had no reasonable interpretation and seemed incredible, almost miraculous. Here he would cross himself just in case, but since childhood Petya has not been used to bow and beat his forehead, and he did not see any sense in abruptly reforging and chameleon: the inside will come out anyway, you can see by the muzzle. He just spread his hands in bewilderment, calling either the pure or the unclean to witness, then froze and stood there for five minutes, slightly opening his mouth, staring at the inflatable miracle of orange rubber.

– Made of rubber? – Pyotr Mikhailovich finally dared to touch the chair with a slightly trembling hand. The chair turned out to be cold to the touch, something like leather or alcantara – Kalinkin didn’t really understand this, but definitely not rubber. Carefully continuing his research, he touched the hood – plastic, the screen looks like a computer monitor, and under the screen, on the basis of the design, a red button sticks out. The button attracted the eye and tempted: push me… It’s not difficult for a child to guess: just push on it, and this kind of painful-tooth-crushing unit will work. The association with dentistry involuntarily cooled the experimenter’s ardor, but not for long.

– Maybe I should call Galya to consult? – the familiar thought of a henpecked man flashed, but for the first time in many years of family life, the subconscious insidiously dictated independence, pushing into the abyss of the unknown, very dangerous. Meanwhile, Galina Sergeevna was rattling dishes in the kitchen, and the usual domestic cacophony calmed her husband and gave him determination.

– In the end, am I a man or not? – he grumbled angrily to himself, mentally imagining himself as a hero next to Ilya Muromets in the picture on the left, and quickly drowned the button. The unit came to life, two rectangles with the words “English” and “Russian” appeared on the lit screen (it was strange that there was no “Galina Sergeevna” option). How inopportunely a thick dictionary was lying around somewhere in a city apartment, but who could have guessed that it would be useful in agriculture? He had to press the Russian icon with my index finger, as in an ATM, and then there were signs with the command:

– “Sit in the chair.” – Well, I sat down.

– “Put on the hood.” – Put it on.

– “Choose time” and two rectangles – “Past” and “Future”.

A sensitive sense of smell and everyday experience suggested: it smells like kerosene. A couple of years ago, Kalinkin found a curious scientific publication in a free newspaper, which they put in mailboxes. Of course, not everyone can handle an article about the hypothetical ability to travel in the universe using space-time tunnels in the form of wormholes. The persistent mind of Pyotr Mikhailovich was able to master it from the second time, but the idea seemed like an incomprehensible invention: is an instantaneous leap in time possible? And here, in the hall, this theory can be confirmed and become a reality! If what was happening wasn’t a game or a waking dream, he was on the verge of a fantastic opportunity. However, Pyotr Mikhailovich quickly realized: after taking the first step, it will not work to change the process, you can lose everything – Galya, the house, the usual and calm way of life, and, perhaps, life itself. The device hardly gives guarantees and insurance. On the other hand, the situation is so unique that, without a doubt, he, Pyotr Kalinkin, is a lucky man chosen by fate, a mole in the tunnel of Time! The unknown was so fascinating and attracted that it outweighed all fears and awakened in him a sense of courage. However, how valuable in his eyes are the promised paradise life on a pension of twenty thousand rubles, and bliss on quarter acre of land? Challenge accepted! The seductress sirens have already started their insidious hypnotic songs:

“Become zero, become zero and everything will be very good,” sounded in his ears, and he decided, as any adventurer would have decided in his place.

– But which rectangle should I click on? – Kalinkin scratched his head in indecision. – There have been a lot of interesting events in the past, from the Early Paleozoic to… however, what is the minimum step back? Is it possible last night? And an hour, a minute ago? If you think big, historically, then I would like to talk to Aristotle or, by the way, even with the cunning Gioconda…

From the suddenly opened prospects, ordinary logic got stuck, fantasies overshadowed common sense. Pyotr Mikhailovich forced himself to calm down, and after a short hesitation decided to apply the method of scientific poke, leaving the choice to his Majesty chance. Really, why break your head? He made a wish, crouching down to the window, and began to observe: if a bird flies from right to left, then it is necessary to fly into the past, and if the vector goes opposite, it means into the future. Five minutes passed, and the birds, as luck would have it, seemed to have hidden somewhere, disrupting the experiment. The impatient observer was already shifting from one foot to the other, unflatteringly describing the whole feathered world to himself, when suddenly some dead sparrow fluttered at the left edge of the frame, then sat down on it, unaware of its historical mission. Seeing the old man’s terrible, unshaven face behind the glass, the chick was stunned with fear, soiled the window, asshole, well, fluttered to the right and pointing to the Future!

– Undoubtedly: very smart people came up with this device, – Kalinkin came to the conclusion when two more signs appeared on the screen – “Time” and “Place”, – everything is concrete, fine tuning! Maybe it’s a virtual reality device, like five D? Then why in such a disguised form? Most likely, it was hidden by aliens from outer space, from another dimension! Those who are on flying saucers, the Americans showed them on video!

On the screen in red – “Attention!” – lit up a memo-instructions for reverse movement for a time traveler:

– “In order to avoid a dangerous situation! The return is activated at any moment of the journey by the command “I want to go back”.

The choice of a place with a poor imagination is obvious: a favorite city on the Neva river, Butlerova street, a native apartment with a balcony on the third floor… The time is at random, in about five years, 2026, June. It was only necessary to answer the questions, as space and time moved apart, absorbing Kalinkin along with the mysterious apparatus.

Ten minutes later, Galina Sergeevna called her husband, then went to look for him in the house, walked around the whole plot, but, to her surprise, she did not find him anywhere. The iron barrel lying on the veranda was also missing.

CHAPTER 2. LEAP INTO THE UNKNOWN

It didn’t seem like a long jump into the future to Kalinkin. Consciousness turned off, as with anesthesia, and it was not possible to feel anything during this movement through the years. Pyotr Mikhailovich opened his eyes and found himself in a painfully familiar six – meter kitchen, clean dishes on the table, flowers on the windowsill, everything neatly tidied up. Cautiously, still not fully believing in what was happening, I walked around the apartment – there is no hostess at home, the situation in the rooms does not seem to have changed, everything is as it was five years ago: Sony TV, photos hang on the walls, including his portrait, books shine with spines in the closet, on the sofa – the usual pillows. I sneaked into the pantry, put my hand under an old blanket – a stash of five hundred rubles on the spot, and his heart was relieved.

He turned on the TV for interest, and there – he don’t understand: either a cartoon, or a press conference:

– Attention, attention, Ivan the Fool at the microphone. Today we will find out how many percent of the remaining people as a result of optimization…

Kalinkin was not interested in fairy tales, and he de-energized the storehouse of news.

– And where is Galina? So June is the same month, she is obviously at the village, planting a vegetable garden, – Pyotr Mikhailovich realized. – Maybe I’m there too?

This metaphysical question took him by surprise: what happened to me in 2026? An amazing discovery was waiting for Pyotr Mikhailovich in the corridor by the mirror: where is my gray beard? A strange face of a man of about forty-five looked at him from the looking glass…

– Wow… – the shocked traveler could only squeeze out and almost cracked his head on the open closet door, and when the ability to think returned, he realized:

– If there is my reflection in the mirror, then the age and appearance change when jumping, a fact! But I wasn’t warned about this monster on four legs…

A clock ticked on the shelf, busily counting down the seconds of the new time.

– Honest mother, what should I do? Kalinkin burst out in despair, but there was no one to hear his words in the deserted apartment. However, there was still hope: upon returning back, everything would return to normal. And how to check: isn’t everything happening an illusion? Slowly going out on the stairs, he called the neighbor’s apartment, introduced himself as a relative of Galina – they say, he did not find her at home. The neighbor opened the door, did not recognize him, but said the obvious about his wife: at the village. But then the following question arose reasonably, and Pyotr Mikhailovich asked it with difficulty – his throat was so tight with excitement: