ABOUT GILDA MUSA
Gilda Musa (1926 - Feb. 26 1999) was a poet, translator and science fiction author, who studied in Milan, Heidelberg and Cambridge, and was fluent in German and English in addition to her native Italian. She published numerous poems in the 1950s and began to move towards science fiction in the early 1960s. Her first science fiction short story, "Total Recall" ("Memoria totale"), was published in issue #3 of "Futuro" from 1963. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she wrote numerous short stories in Italian magazines and wrote five novels between 1974 and 1982.
"Thirty Columns of Zeros" ("Trenta colonne di zeri") was initially published in 1964 in issue #5 of "Futuro". It was collected in the 1972 anthology "Party on the Asteroid" ("Festa sull'asteroide") which collects much of her early short fiction. This translation is based off the "Festa sull'asteroide" text.
THIRTY COLUMNS OF ZEROS
"VUOTO: Void. That which contains nothing inside of it."
- Zingarelli, "Vocabulary of the Italian language"
He felt good that afternoon in the single-story villetta, lying in the armchair next to the glass doors. The giromelis were bursting from their calyxes, some sparkling in streaming jets, others, swollen with color, pushed their tops up as soon as they had emerged. The Lux-Prima shone golden-white, yet almost perpendicular, on the gravel paths, touching the fronds of miros, the branches of colir.
And Nikol thought about how fortunate vegetables are, that they can't lose their balance, stumble into a hole or fall down a well, they can't fly and no one asks, nor demands such of them. The void doesn't exist for them: nor does it exist for a house: a house has a foundation, it's supported by the ground, it can't be moved; but flying through the darkness, the Glicer doesn't grip with any roots, doesn't have a foundation to support it, doesn't rest on anything: space surrounds it from above, below, in front, and from behind, space like infinity, void, nothingness, nothingness without barriers, yet, something into which one can descend, roll, fall, or plummet.
"Help! I'm falling!"
"But be quiet, Nikol, you're not falling, you're strapped in", grumbles Andrevs, awoken suddenly, and snorts "night after night, these nightmares are so annoying, who made you sign up, damn it, and now we can't turn back."
"Ah, I'm here, ah..."
"Of course, where do you want to be?"
"I was dreaming about falling."
"That doesn't sound like anything new to me."
"What torment every night!"
"Look who you're talking to, Nikol. Calm down, shut up, and let me sleep."
All right, finally: with painful tension in his neck and back muscles, Nikol, self-incarcerating like every other evening, secures himself to the bunk with three straps before turning off the tiny fluorolamp. His last glance isn't for the straps, it's for the three-dimensional chromophoto hanging under the transparent bellflower of the fluorolamp, in full oblique light, as the perfect three-dimensional image requires: and eventually as he stares at it, a delicate plane of concrete with a smooth surface emerges in an optical illusion: an oval takes on a roundness in form of cheeks, in a raised mouth outlined by the brush, in sparkling eyes under the light and thin eyelashes that are looking at Nikol capriciously and dreamily. "To you, Nikol, my cosmonaut, with love. Your Leira": sharp handwriting, whimsical in its cuts, is on the opaque-white triangle intended for inscriptions; and as Nikol looks at the straps once again, the switch flips.
"All done?" Andrevs rasps sleepily. "are you okay now?"
Nikol's "I think so"s is a murmur, the first of his "I think so"s; the second, is a response to Andrev's grunting of "Eeeeh?"; an "I think" that redoubles after a moment, and then rises and stops on the "so", "I think...so", an inconclusive conclusion of uncertain certainty, but by this point Andrevs also turns off his fluorolamp, and there's darkness in the cabin: and the Glicer, an oblong egg with a metallic hull, sparkles in stellar reflection, a speck in space, hermetic like a Gernian strix egg, and is heading towards the planet Marsinum, the closest one to Gerna, and the largest one revolving around Lux-Prima: the enormous star that pulls in and sustains ten other planets.
Nikol raises his head and pushes the pillow towards his shoulders to leave no free space between his neck and skull. The superimposed springs take hold, bulging to the right and left, covering even the ears, a padding over these two voids, and the head no longer oscillates, cannot, must not oscillate or swing, but is protected and supported. No one else wanted the spring pillow, everyone else preferred the standard one supplied by the Compagnia, made of synwool covered with a linx canvas, and they sleep soundly, freely in control of a large bunk on which they can toss, turn over, curl up, or get up if necessary: only Nikol had inserted and sewn the straps into the side-tube.
"A child", Andrevs always says, but only to himself, the others don't know anything about Nikol being an astronaut for love, or that this is his first and will be, he swears, his last voyage. But Leira, his girlfriend with iridescent eyes, only clapped her hands for the astronauts during the grandiose Gernian parades when the daring explorers and interplanetary navigators were celebrated; in the interval between one celebration and another - one for every Gernian month - she spoke to him only and always about the cosmonauts, described their uniforms, ennumerated the medals that each of them wore pinned on their sleeves, a memento for every journey completed, "tonight I dreamed that you had gone too, Nikol, and were returning from Marsinum with a medal"; but Nikol was only an administrative technician, he pushed buttons on a calculator, he lined up lists of numbers from the C.L., Compagnia Luxprimaria, he drew up plans, he was a very skilled and esteemed secretary, but had never traveled in space.
"But what does it take to fly? Look at your brother Mizir, my brother-in-law Rolex, and also Bellíis who...".
"Forget it, Leira, not everyone has the calling."
"And yet, if you really loved me as you say, you could give me this little satisfaction. Nininas, yes she is fortunate, Ziro, yes he loves her."
"But Ziro started traveling at sixteen, and I'm already twenty-five, I work in administration, I'm also well paid, and I can marry you right away."
"Marry me, marry me..."
Leira was silent, lowered her large violet eyes, a sure sign of angry discontent, turned her back on him and went to gaze at the stellar astronauts' chromophotos, stuck to the wall in front of her bed with invisible tape.
Leira hid her eyes all too often now, long shadows fell on her cheeks, her doll-like nose appeared more pointed.
"At least one voyage, just one."
Then she had headaches more and more frequently in the evening when she was supposed to go out with Nikol; she said she was ill, and finally she didn't want to see Nikol again for two weeks because he didn't deserve her. Then Nikol decided: he would go, for a single voyage, if he was found fit.
After three months of training and trial, Nikol was deemed fit for space travel, vision, hearing, endurance, stability, all perfect: nerves, muscles, cartilage, blood, heart, lungs, all perfect. And so many exultant and grateful kisses from Leira, an amorous reward for the astronaut, the future astronaut Nikol.
Perfect, yes: but what doctor could possibly see inside his brain? That black circle with fluctuating borders, or without borders, which opened or contracted according to the progression of sentiment (or was it sensation?), that zone that Nikol was unable to define and that no instrument would have been capable of recording, or of capturing, or of revealing, because the ultra-rapid radiographs that recorded his body, millimeter by millimeter, couldn't be imprinted with that "certain something" which perhaps only had the consistency of thought, an inconsistent consistency, yet real inside of him, as no one could have photochromed his love for Leira or his dislike for Leira's friend, that astronaut Bellíis, well-decorated, well-kissed by women, even by Leira, a childhood friend, pure and innocent kisses perhaps, but kisses nonetheless. No one could have said, looking at the diagrams, the photochromes, the radiographs, etc., etc., "You love Leira", or "You, Nikol, dislike Bellíis", or even "You, Nikol, are afraid".
But should Leira have to know about this secret, this atrocious flaw, or was it a fault?, of Nikol; "You're a craven" she would have said with an archaic word, "I can't marry a fearful craven" and "How will you face life?" She often repeated these phrases when referring to others who weren't cosmonauts, like Nikol's friend, for example, Rubios, a first-rate secretary. "A weakling, an incompetant, a faintheart, a craven." And: "How will he face life?"
Healthy, strong, perfect, therefore an excellent astronaut, therefore a modern man, therefore a husband to be proud of, she would say: "Nikol got a medal, he's giving it to me as a wedding present", smiling with feigned indifference at Nininas, also engaged to an astronaut, not at just Nininas, smug and annoying with those pendants on her bracelet, Ziro's three space medals.
"Yes, Nikol and I will get married at the parade after the Glicer's return."
And die in anger, those of you who don't believe that Nikol is fit to fly, poor love, so dear and so fascinating and mysterious in his space suit: you can only see his eyes, enlarged by the plusglass of the mask, but inside that modern knight's armor there is Nikol, a man who is marvellous, miraculous, wondrous, imperious, courageous, and many other -ouses, infinite -ouses, because Nikol loves me and for my love he's leaving, he's leaving tomorrow for Marsinum and in six months he will return glor..., there's another -ous: glorious. And I'll marry him as soon as he comes back.
Where to muster the strength to tell her: "No, Leira; I'm an integral part of this planet, I identify myself with it, I can't leave it"? How to confess this ancestral weakness, as a simple man tied to the banal solidity of a planet made up of land and water, a man adhering to the ground, bound by the force of gravity?
"I'd marry Bellíis if I was a little more sexually attracted to him. He's very handsome though."
If she marries Bellíis. It's possible to think that Leira won't be mine, she won't walk in her blue strix slippers in the bedroom of our house, she won't prepare my carf in the morning as soon as we wake up, and sleepy and warm, she won't lie down a little longer in bed next to me to make love one more time before I get up and go to work, she won't open the door for me when I get home, she won't spend her holidays with me on the sand anymore, tanned and colorful in her miniscule two-piece. She might marry Bellíis because he travels on spaceships. But who am I? I too can travel on a Compagnia spaceship, they never crash, they never suffer accidents, they're perfect, and I'll have nothing to fear.
Nikol can't turn over in his bunk, strapped in as he is, but at least he's sure not to fall, not to feel like his body is abandoned to random jolts; six months should've passed faster, but only ten days have passed, time moves slowly, meanwhile he wishes it would pass faster, but it doesn't. The minutes, the seconds are so long, except when he's working on the calculator, where he's able to imagine that he's not suspended in the monstrous airless void, he pictures that he's in the C.L. office, unable to remember traveling on the Glicer, a speck in the immensity that's supported by nothing, that supports itself, and flies with extreme velocity in a direction towards Marsinum, among cosmic dust, darting fireballs, radiation, distant exploding stars, a suspended egg launched towards a point where Nikol now can't tell if it's north, south, east or west; for him there's no longer a north or a south, no cardinal directions, only space now devoid of Gernian attraction, deviating from the ellipse that at least kept him tied to Gerna, dear, old Gerna where one lives so peacefully, one balances accounts with a calculator in the small office confined by solid walls and a solid floor on the first story of the C.L. skyscraper: administration resided on the first story, and once, a few days before going on the Glicer, Nikol thought he was dying when he took the B IV elevator into the Office of Inventions and Promotions. He could't see the black hole into which the elevator went, but he couldn't stop thinking about it; he knew that under the plastograin floor, a shaft was getting deeper and more frightening as the elevator rose higher; it seemed to him that he was already in the launch pad elevator, and, in every fraction of a second, meters of emptiness stretched out below, a vertical tunnel into which the elevator could fall, and he, locked inside, would fall together for meters and meters. When he woke up on the emergency room bed, the doctor felt his pulse and smiled:
"Good, open your eyes. But what happened to you, Nikol?"
"I didn't have breakfast this morning."
"Eat something, you need it."
* * *
In the morning - or what must be the morning on Gerna - after ten hours of dreaming and being jerked awake, Nikol washes himself by dipping his face into the tub: every object is resting in its place, comb, brush, soap, inside the Glicer's gravitational atmosphere.
He manages to not think about the void if he projects his mind towards his work that awaits him, towards his calculator which isn't much different from the one in the Gernian office: the only difference is that on the spaceship he has to calculate other elements provided by his companions, to him they are nothing but figures: if they refer to distance, to time, to chemistry, physics, atomics, subatomics, they are one and the same, numbers to analyze, subtract, add, divide: he receives instructions from Commander Kubek.
The machine is his true friend, it throws the door between forgetfulness and serenity wide open, because he can't get distracted and musn't make mistakes; the Commander is an understanding man, but he demands absolute precision.
Now he needs to eat breakfast, to descend to the bar, the first step is the same as the second, the third, the fourth, there are ten in all, the staircase has become familiar to him, the bitter smell of carfelàx reaches up to the staircase: how hungry he is! and the calculator waits for him, seven, eight.
"Nikol!" Andrevs' voice sounds from the top of the ladder, and Nikol turns, ten, his right foot drops unsupported, wasn't it ten? perhaps he only got nine down and when Andrevs distracted him and confused his calculations. He felt like he had to put his foot on the ledge in the corridor, but instead he had the sensation of sinking, a void dragging him further down, the tenth step felt like a leap even, like plunging into a trench, a snare, but there is neither trench nor snare, just Andrevs behind him:
"What the hell are you doing? Why are you kneeling?"
"I was checking to see if my shoe was untied."
The handrail stops at the end of the corridor, in front of the bar, and Nikol holds on, walking like a drunkard, ten or fifteen steps; then his head stops spinning, the black circle in his brain is reduced to a point, a pinprick that now disappears. A step is just a step, ten centimeters is less than the palm of your hand, you can't fall down ten centimeters, the corridor floor is smooth and firm, balanced, it doesn't cover any pits, the Glicer was built to help, not to harm the astronauts. He drank a good, boiling hot, aromatic and robust carf with his eyes closed, standing, leaning against the bar; everything's passed, now he can sit at the table, with Andrevs, and also take lax with energy biscuits, become well satiated, and then go to work.
Other men are sitting at the tables, in twos, threes, having breakfast, chatting. Nikol and Andrevs sit in their usual place, Andrevs holds a pipe in the corner of his mouth, he starts smoking as soon as he wakes up and stops only before falling asleep; every now and then the pipe goes out, and he doesn't think about it for a moment, he gnaws on the stem, then refills and relights it.
"Have you slept?"
"Yes."
"Dreamt again?"
"No."
But he should've said "Yes". Twice more, Nikol dreamed of falling and woke up drenched in sweat, but the third time someone saved him, a grandiose blue hand caught him in his terrible flight and held him by a cable; but then he was the hollow of Leira's armpit, and he, tiny, was all there, curled up and warm, until she said, though Nikol couldn't see her, he only heard her voice: "If you love me, you have to go."
"Bravo Nikol, you'll soon get used to it. After all" - Andrevs speaks in a low voice so as not to be heard by others - "the void is nothingness, and one can't be afraid of nothing."
Precisely: the nothingness, this word that has no weight, the negation of consistence, the decay, the disappearance of boundaries; the void: that's what this fear is; a sinking into zero.
Even the zero is nothing, the zero is an apt symbol, just think about how it's written; and now Nikol discovers its absolute and dazzling value, the intuition of those who invented it and outlined it so perfectly corresponding to the truth: the zero: a circular line that has no beginning nor end, no one knows where it begins nor where it ends, rather it begins at any point and ends at any point; and inside that circle is the void, a bottomless space, the nothingness that attracts and nauseates, calls and repels, into which one can sink and slip away to infinity, a zero without consistency and with nothing as its value, it's nothing, a round zero.
The carfelàx cup is also round, its edge is a circumference; if he stares at it carefully, he sees it in a geometric, defined and fixed perfection, but within that circumference the void sinks, and the cup transforms into a well that stretches downwards, projecting far into a dizzying tubularity with a smooth and white wall, without end, and Nikol can fall in, as small as he has become tonight in the hollow of that indigo-violet hand, in the dark hollow of Leira's armpit, tiny as a little finger, and can descend, roll, tumble, pour headlong until he crashes who knows where, or perhaps not crash, but continue to fall without ever stopping. Nikol is biologically made for Gerna, like all the Gernians: detaching him from his planet is violence, a crashing of nature that has been built over millions of years. Yet there are those who fly, who free themselves from the attraction, and can detach themselves from Gerna.
"Drink, eat, what are you looking at in the cup? Is something wrong?"
Nikol blinks his eyes: "Ah, yes," he's pulled back to the reality of an innocent cup, a few centimeters deep, in which the slightly greasy carfelàx stares at him with microscopic eyes of fat, sparkles as minute as pinheads.
Round and full of fatty corpuscles; but if he were to observe them with a high-powered microscope, at the distant bottom of the tube, he would see that they resemble many zeros, irregular little circles that orbit and encircle the void, and that he can fall into the void, because the void is neither small nor large, it's just void, without boundaries, and even as big and robust as he is, Nikol can fall in, he doesn't need to become microscopic, any more smaller than he is tonight.
"And eat, Nikol, stop zoning out like that!"
Nikol suddenly raises his head, stares at Andrevs with a sad and desperate expression, parts his lips, and finally says:
"But tell me, don't you ever think about the void? The cosmic void, I mean."
The smooth egg of the Glicer is flying through interplanetary space; at this moment, the star Antar is suspended precisely one parsec on top of the Glicer's zenith, perhaps its gleam is reflected off the hull, off this shell lost in the darkness, through which it's flying, or perhaps falling, in the void one can fall in any direction, gravity doesn't exist outside of planetary or stellar attraction, and Lux-Prima is too far away to attract the Glicer, Antar is even further away, Gerna is lost behind the Glicer, downwards (or upwards), a small globe, a suspended grain, a corpuscle among corpuscles, Marsinum is still too distant, it registers on no radar, the Glicer is surrounded by only void, it's hurling itself into the void.
"Never. But even if I thought about it, it wouldn't bother me. For me, the void is zero."
Even for him, an expert grey-haired astronaut, the void is equal to zero, exactly like for Nikol. This is despair: Nikol doesn't feel like he's going crazy, he only notices that he's more contemplative, more sensitive than Andrevs; but even Andrevs, positive as he is, knows that the void is zero, it's that nothingness in which one can lose oneself forever while retaining the consciousness of losing oneself, it's the temporal and spatial abyss where there's no longer time or space, no dimensions, a total eradication, and that's the despair of the void, that it can't be palpated, probed, grasped, squeezed, or felt in any way; you can't grab a hold of it to get out of it, because it's not a well with rough walls where a protruding stone would provide support, and yet it's like an immense well, where you can't see the walls or the bottom, but into which you only fall, continuously fall.
Vitamin biscuits, fruit gelatin: Nikol chews slowly and Andrevs talks about his wife Ferisa, his son Miros who just turned eighteen and will finish the S.S.I. this year, the Secondary Schooling International, a good kid, but who doesn't want to become an astronaut and always be away from home and family like his father, he prefers specializing in agricultural technology, specifically growing turcogranis, living in the countryside, and tackling the big problem of new intensive crops in southern Korist.
"Blessed is he, close to the soil, close to the plants, to the roots, and let's hope that when he falls in love with a girl, she doesn't give him the ultimatum: 'if you want to marry me, go on an interplanetary voyage'".
Andrevs would like to smile, but Nikol is speaking too seriously, his voice is tinged with envy and fury; he holds the temptation inside the grimace of his lips that are chewing on the pipe stem: "Now let's get back to work": he, assigned to the teletransmitting dials, must relieve Turbo.
Nikol also has to go back to the calculator, and turns his thoughts towards work, happy to be occupied with this engagement that isolates him with the complexity of its calculations; and now they're going up the stairs, ten steps - Nikol's fingers grip the plastor of the handrail - they enter the tubular corridor with its vast arches, but before they split up to go to their own departments, Nikol lowers his head, closes his eyelids:
"Would you... Would you come with me... pl... please?"
* * *
That evening, Andrevs must exonerate himself before Commander Kubek, who wants to get to the bottom of the matter, shed light on what happened, and determine whoever was responsible. And perhaps that morning's ridiculous episode, which had been repeating itself for days, several times per day, seems like proof of Nikol's evident fixation to Andrevs; and a testimony to his own innocence.
"Even this morning, after breakfast, he asked me to come with him. He was sweating from shame and was stammering, I felt sorry for him, but went with him as usual. He was sitting, or rather not sitting, but was almost standing, a little bent over, trying not to touch the seat. He kept his forehead lowered, all pale and embarrassed. He had pulled his shirt well past his thighs so I wouldn't see, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to watch him anyway. I gave him my hand by holding my arm stretched backwards, with my back to him; I felt his nails digging into my palm, he was holding me so tight; with my other hand I pinched my nostrils with my fingers waiting for him to finish: you know how fun it is being locked up in that tiny space, after all. But what could I do, he asked me to stay close to him, to hold him tight because otherwise he felt like he was going to fall into the hole, and he asked me with such intense humiliation, he apologized so much that I couldn't say no to him, I just said 'forget about it?' instead. I felt sorry for him, poor Nikol, and with my forty-eight years of age I could almost be his father or at least an older brother. These episodes had been happening for three days now."
"But you didn't suspect that he'd gone mad?"
"No, Commander, absolutely not, because apart from that infantile fear, there was nothing else abnormal. He reasoned well, he spoke to me about his childhood, he lost his mother when he was three years old: his mother died falling from the kitchen balcony, or had thrown herself, I don't know; he spoke to me about his work as an administrative technician at the Compagnia office, about his upcoming marriage with a certain Leira, the one from the chromophoto... Normal, in short. A good kid."
"And the night terrors didn't make you suspicious?"
"They were a bit of a nuisance for me, I admit, but I didn't find any abnormalities in them. Commander, who among us hasn't had similar nightmares on our first voyage? For a long time, I also dreamed of falling. Then I got used to it."
"Me too," Turbo says, "then I started taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills, and everything went away."
"But what else did Nikol do today? We need to reconstruct the day according to the testimonies of those who saw him, of those who were close to him."
Nikol sits at the calculator, works all morning. He pushes the buttons, pulls the levers, adds, takes the strips out of the slots, lowers the trimmers, checks, compares.
Someone remembers passing behind him but he doesn't turn around. All normal; only Regir says that at a certain point he saw him put his head in his hands and rest his elbows on the calculator shelf, as if he were tired; then he glanced at a piece of paper that Nikol had in front of him, and saw a page full of zeros, "there must have been thirty, forty horizontal rows of zeros, also lined up vertically; at least thirty columns of zeros; and I wondered to myself if Nikol was playing at getting some rest; but as I left, I said: let's leave him to it, we all need some entertainment in here, and I don't have to check his work, after all."
Miro observed this during lunch: he was seated right in front of him in the break room, cutting a loaf into many slices. With his index finger, he dug out all the crumbs and left only the crust. "They looked like little toilet seats, I thought, he doesn't want to eat the crumbs, every now and then some of us go a little crazy, you know, and I think about something else. Nikol was staring at those seats and moved his mouth like he was saying something, but I couldn't hear anything. I was chatting with Turbo, after all."
Another remembers that around five, when passing through corridor B, he poked his head into the lounge to see if anyone was there to talk to. Nikol was in an armchair, slumped over with tense shoulders. "He looked pale to me: I got closer and saw that he had a cigarette holder in his hands. He was looking through the mouthpiece to the hole where the cigarette is inserted. He was still, as if he were sleeping, but he wasn't sleeping; his fingers were shaking, and when I called him he jumped as if he hadn't seen me come in. Then he looked at me for a while, silently, with a discomfited face, and finally asked me, almost shouting: 'Are you married?' 'No, with this mess I haven't had time to think about it yet.' 'Ah - he says - I'm engaged to a madwoman.' I started laughing, then he laughed too, forcedly, and said: 'Not really mad, but it's as if she were, and it drives me mad too.' 'Love is madness' I said jokingly; but he wasn't joking at all, he didn't answer anymore because he was intent on looking towards the lower table. Then he got up from the armchair, began to stare at the flower vase, the one on the table, you know which one, and ran a finger over the rim, all around it, along the entire circumference, as if he wanted to remove the dust. He looked inside it as if he wanted to see the bottom, or was looking for something, who knows. Since he wasn't sick and wasn't speaking anymore, I thought he wanted to be alone and think about the girl, so I left."
"And then? Afterwards?"
Commander Kubek turns his gaze around, slowly fixing it on the faces of the men gathered in a circle in the command center. Nobody knows anything else, nobody has seen him again; it was precisely around six o'clock, two hours ago, that Andrevs entered the cabin to get a handkerchief and saw Nikol. He was the last one to see him, and happened to be alone when the incident happened, no other witnesses.
"You, Andrevs, did you ever argue with Nikol?"
"Never, signor Commander. Nikol was a quiet kid. I was fond of him by now, I understood his weakness, I wanted to help him, and I helped him as much as I could."
"Tell me exactly what happened when you entered the cabin."
"I enter, Nikol is standing in front of his closet, still, with his head down, and his back is turned to me. I say to him: 'Hello, old man'; he turns his head suddenly, looks at me for a while without speaking, then makes an evil face and says: 'Now I'm going to send her the bottom of this hole', and as he turns, I see that he's holding a pistol in his hand, in his right hand, and with the index finger of his left hand he points towards the hole in the barrel. 'What?' - I say - 'put the pistol down, are you crazy?' Nikol raises the pistol, peers into the hole with one eye, his hand trembles, the barrel swings, he looks without saying a word, I don't understand what he's looking at in the hole, then he says: 'down! down! down!', as he jumps near the bunk: only then do I realize that the chromophoto of the girl is on the bed, taken out of the frame and the frame is on the ground, in three pieces. 'Did it fall?' I ask him, but Nikol doesn't answer me, he puts the pistol on the bunk, grabs the chromophoto, starts rolling it up tightly, like a small tube. I don't have time to grab the pistol as it was already in his hand, his right, and with his left he's trying to put the photo inside the barrel and the whole time he's just saying 'down! down! down! You're going to the bottom now!' I don't know what the hell it meant, I just understood that Nikol was sick, and that I couldn't exacerbate his excitement by shouting out or calling for someone. I told him calmly: 'Nikol, come with me to the bar and let's have a drink', but I hardly had time to finish, and as I was thinking 'How can I take that pistol out of his hand without it firing?', he pulled the trigger. The revolver fell, I didn't touch it. Commander, have my fingerprints taken, it's not possible that mine could be on there. He shot himself, I didn't, and why, then? I'm certain that Nikol didn't want to do it, though. He wanted to return to Gerna, live there and work: I think he just wanted to stick the girl's photo in the barrel and not think about her anymore. Why he wanted to stick it in there, I don't know, all he had to do was tear it up if he didn't want to see it in front of him again: I know, however, that he only went on this voyage to please that Leira, an idiot from what I understand, mad for cosmonauts, but he was madly in love and didn't want me to say she was an idiot, and he didn't even want it known that he was afraid, that he still wasn't used to being on the spaceship. He confided this fear to me the first night, when he woke up screaming; he thought he was going to fall, but nothing else could be done then, we were already in flight."
"If you, Andrevs, had told me right away, we could have sent Nikol back to Gerna in an escape pod."
"I suggested that to him too, but Nikol was even more terrified at the idea of the pod which is so small and, as he said, so fragile. Furthermore, Commander, I've remained completely silent because I swore to him that I wouldn't talk about it, and because I was convinced, truly convinced, that in a few days his fear would pass. Tonight, for example, he only woke up once. He told me this morning at the bar."
The Commander is convinced that Andrevs is innocent, he'll order the testing on the pistol, then it will be necessary to give Nikol a burial, a burial in space.
* * *
The robust body of Nikol is stuffed head first into the mouth of a crystal-plastic bag, a type of flexible and very light tubing that is sealed below the dead man's feet; and through the wrapping's transparency, lying down, Nikol appears in his Gernian height and beauty, the fine brown hair combed and parted on the left, the eyelashes lowered in two arches that forever cover the sweetness of his patient eyes, the straight nose, the slightly large mouth: but an enigmatic desperation is imprinted in his features, not even death has managed to spread the serenity of nothingness over him.
And now down in the hold, Andrews and Turbo raise the corpse, unlock the devices of the circular hatch on which Nikol is delicately placed; a second hatch opens correspondingly under the weight, while the first one on top closes, making the floor level again, and the hold goes back to being just the hold, covered in green plastograin. The second hatch snaps, and violently raises, closes again; it then snaps, opens downwards, and with one jolt it lowers the corpse onto a third hatch; then it snaps and closes and onto the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, up to the seventh which opens outwards, releases Nikol's body, and the outermost aperture closes, pushed back by the automatic total pressure spring: and not a breath, not a variation in the atmosphere was felt inside the Glicer, the hydrometers' needles were pointing at the same figure, the barometers recorded the same pressure, the gravitatiometers' straight line measuring the force of gravity on the network did not sway by a micron.
Nikol meanwhile, enclosed in the thin crystal-plastic coffin, abandoned in the colorless void, undulates suspended in an immensity that has neither up nor down, perhaps he descends and falls towards a star or a planet or an asteroid, or perhaps he rises, ascends towards a celestial body that pulls him in, no one can know, only that he's wandering in the void, in the circle without borders, in the zero that is the void, a gigantic zero without edges, without walls, without bottom, in which drifting far away, and perhaps unattainable, are planets stars comets fireballs nebulae asteroids cosmic dust, an endless infinity, populated and depopulated, frightening, filled of astral bodies, itself in motion, which advances according to unknown laws towards unknown destinations.
Or, perhaps, it doesn't advance: rather, more accurately, it crashes, tumbles, falls, and rolls itself up in absurd and convulsive motions aimed towards nothing.
