The Makers
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As time passed, Alpha was enlarging and complicating, and in a few years it already didn't look like aluminum can. Now it was a huge glassium hemisphere, it reached several kilometers in diameter, and in the middle of its top was mounted the VNIITFA brainchild - the multi-legged black gravitator.
The gravitator made possible an appearance on Alpha of soil, plants, the Valley with its water terraces and even several animals. Now Alpha was a fairy kingdom, about which mothers of the Earth told their children before going to sleep.
"Alpha is a half of big brilliant Christmas tree toy," a some mother told her little daughter in the evening. "There are magic animals and two princes there. The animals can talk, and the princes can understand without words, conjure and predict the future, but none of them have yet found their princess. Sleep, sweet heart. You'd be a princess, when you grow up."
And the baby fell asleep, smiling, wrapped in the dreams of its magical future, as in a blanket.
***
"Just tell me, Lukasz..." Robert, dressed only in shorts, drew a rectangle around the sugar on the table with his fingers, then tapped at its right upper corner, and the sugar disappeared from the table and appeared in the can on the shelf. "Why should we be locked up here as offenders? We don't do them any harm. No, you don't bore me. And it doesn't mean any stuff like I wanted to join that ridiculous matter that there, underneath, for centuries saws and saws the bough on which it's sitting. I've got a body, and it just wants the emotions that Alpha can't give.
"A woman?" Lukasz exhaled. He was practicing inside a dense rubber simulator on the opposite wall. "You know the chemistry of the process as well as I do, make it quieter."
"But I wanna no quieter," Robert insisted doggedly. "I wanna like this. Imagine it's surfing. Is it really fun - to pretend be a kiter in place where there is never a wind or waves? It's not just a woman. I know you wanna it too - to give up on your "quiet" chemistry and feel the real drive. We've got a wings..." he'd gently moved his naked shoulders, and behind his back waved and almost at the same instant disappeared two huge wings: "...but there is no sky."
"It's unlikely they'll let you go there for no reason." Lukasz had pulled his hands out of the simulator, hauled himself up, pulled his legs out of him, and jumped to the floor. "Make up a mission on the Earth for yourself and prepare your immunity. In the meanwhile, I'll take a shower."
"Not bad," Robert said, rising thoughtfully. "But I've no any idea."
As if reading his sad thoughts, the communicator suddenly clinked in the adjacent room.
Robert tapped the callsign for the door, entered, stucked his forefinger at the singing screen on the wall, and, while it was loading, hastily brushed his hair and winked at himself in front of the dark screen, like in front of a mirror.
"Hello, my homeland, how did you sleep without me?" he uttered in a low pleasant voice to the cursor, that was still blinking in the middle of the screen.
"Hi, Bob," the lighted screen responded in a nervous voice, and Lully Kerning's frightened freckled face emerged from the depths of the screen. "All is not going very well. Hawaii was stormy, the next oil tanker got spilled out into the Yellow Sea, and Mexico was digging up some sort of infection that no one knows how to cure. And how are you?"
"Well, probably not as bad as you there, below. We've neither tankers here nor contagion," Robert joked in response without thinking and gasped: "What are you talking about, Lully? What kind of infection?"
"I'm not alone today," Lully said, hold her hand out above the screen, and the scale has immediately changed, revealing a crowded control room, in which not only the due group was on duty, but also a lot of strangers. "Mr. Gilels, it's Mr. Vandarli."
"Hello, Mr. Vandarli."
Mr. Gilels was a lean man with a long face, who was sitting on the right of Lully.
"I know that you don't need unnecessary curtsy, so I'll talk about a deal right now," he said after a short pause. "I was in El Paso this morning. There was a quarantine declared there."
Well, Robert thought, his hands are trembling, breathing is loud, and voice is unnatural... It seems, the case really takes an intriguing turn. And there are the kin there, on the Earth...
"From the other side of the Mexican border, in Ciudad Juarez... We faced a queer epidemic," Mr. Gilels continued, nervously picking at the sleeve of his expensive jacket. "Over the last three days, ten thousand people were hospitalized there, and the vast majority of them are children. They all have a trouble with thermoregulation and metabolism. So far, no one has died, but that's all. And this morning the first child has contracted from our side. In short, we need you here. Both of you."
Robert had to work hard to suppress a smile, which began to stretch all over his face. Here it is, a mission! And the Maker's immunity is very funny, but very obedient...
"Mr. Vandarli, we'll send a shuttle for you, it should arrive tonight at twenty-thirty GMT," Mr. Gilels went on, as if the oncoming Maker's visit to the Earth was a trivia and common thing. "Could you get ready by this time?"
"Long donning isn't included in the list of our shortcomings," Robert trifled by inertia.
"Great," Mr. Gilels nodded, then Lully's thin hand again flashed for a moment, and the screen went off.
Robert squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, not believing he had heard. The Earth gave permission! Moreover, the Earth is waiting for him!
"Aha! Lukasz!" he shouted as mad. "How about tequila?! I know a fury lot of ways how to drink it! Where we can buy a quesadilla in Ciudad Juarez?!"
"You haven't money for it," Lukasz remarked from the bath.
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