Alice: The Girl From Earth - Булычев Кир - Страница 2

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On the forty-sixth day of this madness the egg began to suddenly shake and shudder. My friend Professor Yakata and I were at that moment beside the hood which sheltered the egg with tea cups in our hands. We had already given up hope that anything would ever come out of the egg alive. We had been forced to halt the x-rays and other scanners because of the likelihood of damaging our ‘baby,’ And we hadn’t been able to predict the date and time of the delivery in as much as no one in the world prior to this had so far managed to deliver brontosaurs into the world..

And now, suddenly, the egg shook and shook, then it broke with a crack and through the thick leathery shell of the Egg a black, snake-like head began to emerge. The automatic cameras and data recorders began to click like mad. I knew that a red light had gone on over the door to the incubator room outside. Throughout the area of the Zoo something approaching panic took hold.

Five minutes later we were surrounded by everyone who had a right to be here and anyone who was able to find a spot and wanted in. It became very warm and very stuffy.

At last the small brontosaur forced its way completely out of the egg.

“Papa, what’s he called?” I suddenly heard a familiar voice.

“Alice!” I was shocked. “How did you get in here?”

“I came with the correspondents.”

“Children cannot come in here.”

“I can. I told everyone I was your daughter. They let me through.”

“Don’t you know it isn’t very nice to use the people you know for private ends?”

“But papa! Bronty’s so small; he’ll be bored without other children. So I came too.”

I could only throw up my hands. I didn’t have a minute free or I would have escorted Alice from the incubator myself, and there was no one around who would have agreed to do it for me either.

“Just stay right here and don’t go anywhere.” I told her, and I headed for the hood covering the newborn brontosaur.

All that evening Alice an Is aid absolutely nothing to each other. I utterly forbade her to go anywhere near the incubator, but she just said to me, as though she had not heard a word that I said, “I feel so sorry for Bronty,” and the very next day she was right beside the incubator again. Some of the space men from the Jupiter-8 mission brought her. The space men were heros, and no one was going to refuse them anything.

“Good morning, Bronty.” She said, standing right next to the hood.

The baby brontosaur looked at her with a squint.

“Whose is that child?” Professor Yakata asked me. I tried to make myself invisible and failed..

But Alice was not one to slink away at mere words.

“Don’t you like me?” She parried.

“Oh no, it’s not that. Quite the contrary. I just was thinking, er, that maybe, hm, you had gotten lost….” The professor was quite unable to carry on a conversation with a little girl.

“Too bad.” Alice said. “But I’ll be back tomorrow to see you, Bronty. Don’t be bored.”

And Alice did in fact come back the next day, and she came nearly every day. Everyone liked her and let her through without a word. I quite washed my hands of the matter. After all, our house sits right next to the Zoo and, we could hardly bar the road or build a wall.

Brontosaurs grow very quickly. After only a month his was two and a half meters long, and we moved him to a specially constructed pavilion. The young brontosaur roamed throughout the fenced enclosure and munched on young bamboo shoots and bananas. The bamboo was brought in on the freight rocket from India but the bananas came from local hothouses. We put a cement wading pool in the middle of the enclosure and filled it with hot, salty water. The baby dinosaur loved it.

Then suddenly he lost his appetite. For three days he left the bananas and bamboo untouched. By the fourth day the brontosaur lay on the bottom of the pool and rested his small black head on the plastic rim. Everyone could see he was getting ready to die. This was something we could not permit to happen. There was only one brontosaur in all the world, and we had him. The best doctors in the world helped us. But all in vain. Bronty refused grass, vitamins, oranges, milk… Everything!

Alice knew nothing of this tragedy. I had sent her off to her grandmother’s at Vnukovo. But on the fourth day she happened to turn on the television just at the moment when the news about the brontosaur’s worsening health was read. I still don’t know how she convinced her grandmother, but non the same morning Alice ran into the pavilion.

“Papa!” She shouted. “How could you not tell me? How could you?”

“Later, Alice, later.” I answered. “We’re having a meeting.”

We were in fact having a meeting at the time. It had been going on for the last three days.

Alice said nothing more and ran out. And a few minutes later I heard a great deal of gasping, ooh-ing, and ah-ing from close by. I turned and saw that Alice had already crossed through the barrier, wormed her way into the enclosure and had run up to the brontosaur’s head. She had a bulky roll from lunch counter in one hand.

“Eat, Bronty.” She said. “Or you’ll starve yourself to death here. If I were living here, I’d get sick of bananas too.”

I hadn’t even made it to the barrier when something unbelievable happened. Something which was greatly to Alice’s credit and which strongly soiled our, the biologists, reputations.

The brontosaur lifted his head, looked at Alice, and carefully took the dinner roll in her hands.

“Don’t make so much noise, Papa.” Alice waved her finger at me. She had seen me frozen, half way across the barrier. “Bronty’s afraid of you.”

“He won’t do anything to her.” Professor Yakata said.

I could see for myself that the dinosaur wasn’t doing anything. But what would happen if her grandmother came on this scene?

Afterwards the scientists argued the point endlessly. Some said Bronty just needed a change of diet, while others that he just trusted Alice more than he trusted us. Whatever the reason, the crisis ended.

Now Bronty has become entirely domesticated. Although he is now more than thirty meters long he likes nothing better than to take Alice for a ride. One of my assistants has constructed a special saddle and when Alice comes to the pavilion Bronty inserts his enormous neck into the corner and takes in his triangular teeth the saddle standing there and carefully lifts it to his shiny black back. Then he and Alice go for a ride around the pavilion or go swimming in the pool.

As I had promised Alice I took her along when I went to Mars for a conference.

The flight was uneventful. True, I do not take weightlessness well and therefore preferred to keep to the acceleration couch, but my daughter spent all her time flitting around the ship and once I was called to remove her from ceiling of the control room because she had wanted to press the red button the one for emergency deceleration. But the pilots were not really very angry with her.

On Mars we looked around the city, went with a tour group into the desert and even visited the Grand Cavern. But after this I had no more time to be with my daughter and I took her to the local boarding school for the week. A great many specialists from Earth work on Mars, and the Martians have helped us construct an enormous dome for a children’s camp. The camp is a fine place there are real Earth trees growing there. Sometimes the kids go on excursions.

When they do, they wear their own space suits and walk in a file down the street.

Tatiana Petrovna that was the name of the headmistress said that I could leave her there without a worry. Alice also told me not to worry. And I said good-bye to her for the week.

On the third day Alice disappeared.

It was a totally extraordinary event. To begin with, in all the years the boarding school had been in operation it had never lost, or even mislaid, a single child for more than ten minutes. It was totally impossible to get lost in the city on Mars. Let alone an Earth child, in a space helmet. The first Martian who saw him would bring him back to the school. Not to mention the robots. And the police. No, getting lost on Mars is completely impossible. But Alice had done it.

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