There and then

At the moment when the elderly patient opened her eyes from sleep, I continued to look at her. Probably, she once drove men crazy… Gray hair retouched with red paint, white skin, folds at the corners of thin lips, a fragile figure – a faded ghost of a distant world where she spent her youth, a reality that will never return. And she longed for its return. Otherwise, why use neural networks to portray herself as a heroine of a Disney cartoon? The woman caught my gaze and smiled.

– How is your leg, Lyudmila Gennadyevna? – I asked. – It aches a lot, did it keep you from sleeping?

“Ah, a ceratosaurus!” she responded cheerfully.

“It wasn’t a ceratosaurus…” I answered sadly.

– Where do you get such confidence from, doctor?

I sighed tiredly.

– I just know exactly what happened to you.

– So finally tell me your truth!

– You will have to remember on your own.

The doctor before you said the same thing. By the way, doctor, what is your first and middle name?

– Just call me “doctor”.

– Exactly, the previous doctor behaved the same way. What city am I in?

– You ask a lot of unnecessary questions.

– I heard, I heard, you all work for the secret services, you know about the time machine and now you pretend that I'm crazy!

– No one thinks you're crazy. We're dealing with confabulations – false memories.

I walked over to the window. I didn't work for the secret services and I understood that the patient was delirious. I understood not because I couldn't believe in the existence of a time machine, but because I really knew exactly what had happened to her before the amnesia.

“Well then,” I said, “I want to hear your story in person.”

I thought that this way she would trust me more quickly, and it would become clearer to me what was going on in her soul.

– They've already told you…

– But still…

– Oh my God! It all started when I caught the professor's interest.

– Did the professor have a name?

– His name was Sasha. But I didn't want to call such a charming man by his first name and patronymic, so for me he simply became “professor”.

– How strong was your love for him?

– Well, I had purely platonic feelings. Life found meaning for me.

– I see. The professor was the whole world for you. Go on. How did you meet this remarkable man?

“I was collecting herbs in the courtyard of the institute, and this attracted the attention of the professor, he invited me to dinner.

– Did you agree because you were hoping for something?

– To be honest, there was hope, but I soon discarded it. The professor asked how long and how well I knew herbs, and told me that the institute's activities, to which I was accustomed, were the tip of the iceberg, serving as a distraction, the main thing was secret developments, and a sense of herbs could be useful to them in finding the flower.

– Isn’t it strange that the chief accountant of the enterprise, that is, you, knows nothing about the financial flows that lie at the base of, as you put it, the “iceberg”?

– I realized that all my activities at the institute were part of that very “Potemkin village.”

– And it didn’t seem incredible to you that a secret organization was ready to open up to a woman who had nothing to do with science or government service, and all just for the sake of her intuition about herbs?

– You underestimate me, Doctor. Firstly, no one can keep their mouth shut as well as accountants. Secondly, I really do have an intuition for herbs.

– You blabbed everything to the hospital doctors. Is this what you call “keeping your mouth shut”?

– I explained that the professor's last words that I remember were that I would have to demand access to the time machine if I wanted to meet him again. I have no right to betray him.

– There is no time machine.

– Did you check? Why don't you just go and check?

“Who will give us access to secret developments?” I retorted. “I’m just trying to get used to your world.”

– Aren’t you from the special services?

– No.

– Then why don’t you want to tell me your name or the name of the city we are in?

– And again – unnecessary questions… Tell me, how long have you been interested in herbs?

– I became interested in this topic when I was about twenty. It seemed to me that different herbal teas would help to preserve youth for a long time. The wisdom of the ancestors, you know…

– So, the doctor told you about secret developments right in the restaurant, without fear of wiretapping and so on?

– Yes. But he didn't really reveal his cards then. I saw the time machine later.

– What did the professor look like?

– Ooo! Tall, strong, with silver strands, in a light suit, neat sideburns… Such a velvety baritone…

– How did you find out about the time machine?

– The professor led me through a secret door in one of the basements of the institution. We found ourselves in a huge laboratory lined with blue tiles, among a tangle of multi-colored wires, fluorescent lamps flickering… Do you know what the time machine looked like?

I shook my head.

It resembled a train carriage, just as green. It had spacious and cozy compartments-cabins with windows on both sides. Each apartment, yes, an apartment, with all the amenities, was equipped with a separate door, which had to be reached by a retractable ribbed steel ladder with railings. The thing is, they explained to me, that the mechanics of the machine are located in its bottom, which is why the rooms are located so high. But do not think that we traveled to the Mesozoic as in a train compartment. In the forward room, they fastened us to bunks arranged around a black opaque cylinder, like flower petals, after which they closed the lids sliding to the left over each bed. During the journey, we were in darkness, and everything rattled. It reminded me of being in an MRI machine…

– Were you scared?

– Only the first time.

– I think they told me that you claim that you were always in a specific time period of the Mesozoic, on a specific island?

– Yes, but once a week the professor let me go to Minsk to communicate with the children. And we returned together with the professor.

– How many children do you have?

– Two. Misha and Dasha. From different husbands. They are adults and live in Moscow.

– Are you married?

– Divorced.

– Isn’t it rare, in your opinion, to call children once a week?

– I told them the story about a business trip to Siberia, as the professor advised. To a small village with no connection, but once a week we supposedly went to the city. By the way, doctor, how about I talk to the children? When I asked the doctors before you about this, they said I was asking unnecessary questions…

– That's right. First, you should restore your memory.

– Are my children alive? Did nothing happen to them?

– Put yourself in my place. I am forbidden to talk to you about anything other than what you told me yourself. All the more reason for you to remember everything as soon as possible.

I saw fear on her intelligent face.

– So, you said that you arrived on an island. How big was this island?

– Yes, an island from the late Jurassic period. It was very large. Our time machine was parked on the seashore, on the beach. Such fine white sand with ammonites: Zaraiskites and Dorsoplanites, instead of shells on the shore, and azure water, like on advertising posters… And instead of seagulls – pterosaurs, white, with yellow beaks and round cockscombs, also yellow, in flight these reptiles looked clumsy, like flattened chicken carcasses! Behind the beach there was a coniferous forest, similar to a pine forest, and on the beach itself there were cycad palms, reminiscent of giant pineapples. A river flowing out of the forest flowed into the sea, its waters darkened in the thicket, and ferns and mosses grew on the steep slopes…

Of all the currently fashionable discourses, I especially dislike talk about worlds. Do you understand what a world is? The inner world of a person, family and collective worlds, the world between people who share the same values ​​and are in certain relationships, worlds drawn by storytellers, empires, cultures, and even entire civilizations… Yes, every world is limited in space and time. And even our Universe is considered to have a beginning and expands, and then – compression, singularity, and – the end. Worlds arise and disappear. Yes, it is terrible, but I can’t do anything about it. Although, as a doctor, I probably know how to do something… I don’t understand why I chat about this, tragically rolling my eyes. But it was precisely about worlds, and only about worlds, that the patient seemed to be going to talk to me.

Suddenly it dawned on me.

– Let's temporarily interrupt the exciting story about dinosaurs and discuss your past before meeting the professor. I want to identify parallel trends in your biography and in the story about the Mesozoic, as well as the contradictions between these two worlds. Perhaps this will help us move forward.

– Based on your theory that I have confabulations? But haven't you heard, Doctor, about recurring events in life, and that they are always a little new? As you can see, there is at least one more interpretation of those coincidences and incidents that you are going to extract from my revelations.

– Let's check how much your story corresponds to the hypothesis of recurring events, – I answered. – Tell me: you were married at least twice, and both marriages were unsuccessful. Who were your husbands and why did you get divorced?

– My first husband was a military man. He often used physical force against me, and I couldn't stand it. My second husband served as a City Council deputy. He cheated on me.

– Have you had relationships with men other than official ones?

– I was in a civil marriage with a prosecutor.

– And how did it all end?

– He was killed.

– All of them were, let's say, representatives of the authorities… Did you seek protection from the state? The story with the professor somehow doesn't fit into this chain.

– You are wrong. They radiated strength, just like the professor. Who also worked for the state. And what woman doesn't want to see a strong man next to her?

– Well, you know, women are different… Okay, and what about earlier years? Were you in love when you were at school?

– Of course, I experienced my first love for a classmate.

– Very interesting. Who was he?

– Rustam? The son of an Azerbaijani businessman.

– Tall and strong?

– Of course.

– And what did he grow up to be?

– I have no idea.

– Why did you break up?

– We weren't together. It was unrequited love!

– Platonic?

– Possibly. What are you drumming your fingers on the windowsill for, Doctor? Can't you draw a parallel between the images of the professor and the businessman's son?

– Do you have any unpleasant memories associated with this, what’s his name, Rustam?

The patient frowned. I clasped my hands behind my back and paced back and forth across the room.

– Come on! Did you remember something?

– I had a girlfriend, a plump one. We sat at the same desk. And there was a boy there, an outcast, his name was Ruslan. His mother was Armenian, and his father was Azerbaijani. Accordingly, his last name was Azerbaijani, but everyone knew about the Armenian blood in his veins. And it happened in Baku. I graduated from school there, in Azerbaijan. During the January events, I was in the ninth grade. And this happened in the tenth or eleventh grade. After school, I left for Belarus. In general, his classmates avoided him… He sat alone, at the last desk. I myself looked down on him. And he dared to confess his love to this friend of mine, her name was Fidan. Rustam gathered his classmates, they surrounded Ruslan and forced him to apologize to the girl publicly, for the fact that he allegedly encroached on her honor by confessing his feelings… Of course, like any teenager, I tried to be like everyone else, but that time it turned out too much, it reminded me of something like when a person is valued based on blood relationship, like the fascists who attacked our country in 1941… I found it unpleasant to contemplate my first love in such a role. But I myself sang along with them…

“Were women sent to the Mesozoic besides you?” I asked quickly, sitting down on a chair in front of her bed.

The patient closed her eyes.

– Yes, there was a woman working there, a cook, she accompanied them on every paleontological expedition, told many exciting stories about different eras…

– Chubby?

– Plump.

– Were you friends?

– Yes.

– Were there any conflicts between you and the professor because of her?

The patient thought for a moment and finally responded:

– Yes. Doctor?

– I'm listening.

– That boy, a half-breed, was making dinosaurs out of plasticine at the back of the class. He would sharpen matchsticks with a safety razor blade and insert them as teeth for a tyrannosaurus, or as horns for a ceratopsian. But, Doctor, my children collected dinosaur figurines too! Who wasn't fascinated by dinosaurs as a child?

– Tell us about the conflict that happened between you and the professor because of the cook.

– We often caught fish from a boat that was delivered to the Mesozoic in a special way, without this machine in which we lived. The professor watched carefully: rare fish had to be released, so that the “butterfly effect” that Ray Bradbury wrote about did not happen, that’s how he explained it. And fish that were plentiful could be cut up and fried. Proscinetes were usually caught, they are like the moon, but not as moon-like as aquarium angelfish. How do you like my description? And so, this woman, her name is Rita, came up with the idea of ​​feeding the ichthyosaur ophthalmosaurus with proscinetes. You know, its fin sticks out of the water like a shark or a dolphin when it stays near the surface. Ophthalmosaurus loved to show off in front of the crew of our vessel, it followed a parallel course for a long time, beating its tail on the water, whipping up foam. Imagine: you are at the stern, bubbles from the boat, and behind you there is an ichthyosaur, also leaving a furrow! Such an unusual sight… In general, the professor praised Rita very much for how cleverly she came up with the idea of ​​studying the behavioral habits of the sea lizard. That's what the professor called it: “conducting ethological studies of the Mesozoic fauna.” I felt jealousy, which I tried to ignore. I tried to push my hatred for Rita and the ichthyosaur deep under the pillow. Well, so, the professor and I were sailing one day on an inflatable boat equipped with a motor to the ship to take lanterns there for night fishing. An ophthalmosaurus appeared. Probably, it greeted us in a peculiar way. And I put a bullet from a pistol into the monster, explaining my actions to myself by the fact that the professor was in danger: it would be easy for a six-meter monster to capsize a boat. We were all given pistols immediately upon arrival in the Mesozoic. They always remained loaded, in a holster on our belts. Then I analyzed myself and realized that I had simply taken revenge on the professor out of jealousy. And in the Mesozoic, there was no way to cure the ichthyosaur. The professor had to return to Minsk, and from there send a special capsule to the past for teleporting especially large animals. Fortunately, such equipment had been provided. The ichthyosaur was operated on in Minsk, then returned to our island, and released into the wild. The entire expedition gathered. Rita wiped away her tears, seeing the reptile off to sea. And the professor was very angry. “Lyudmila Gennadyevna, do you understand what the “butterfly effect” is?” he asked, and I blushed in front of him like a girl. Then my beloved waved his hand.

“That’s strange,” I said.

– Of course, it was imprudent of me to just call him my beloved… I was a bit worried, doctor!

“The session is over for today,” I announced. “We'll continue our conversation tomorrow. Emotions are running high. You and I both need to think.”

And when I showed up the next day, she was no longer sleeping.

“You need to lie down,” I said dryly.

– But my leg is at rest, and nothing else seems to hurt. You know, Doctor, there in the boat with the motor, with a pistol in my hand, I must have resembled a cowgirl. If I had been younger in the face, the professor might have fallen in love with me.

I noticed that she was missing two front teeth in her mouth: one on the top right and one on the bottom left.

– How many people worked in total on the Mesozoic expedition?

– Seven, or nine. I'll count them now!

The patient began to bend her fingers.

– Exactly! Nine people, including me.

– Are the rest of you, besides you and the cook, men?

– Yes sir.

– What was the purpose of the expedition? You mentioned some flower.

– Yes, sir. Nanjinganthus dendrostyla is the oldest angiosperm. The professor taught that in the Jurassic period, when there were only ferns around, finding this plant was like finding a fern flower. He claimed that they had good reason to find the flower on the island, because there were bees that pollinated it.

– Were there bees in the Jurassic period?

Imagine! The oldest bees and the oldest flowers, together from the very beginning! Have you heard the romantic Russian hypothesis that dinosaurs did not die out from a meteorite strike? In the distant Permian period, at the end of the Paleozoic, our theromorph ancestors occupied the ecological niches of large animals, and the ancestors of dinosaurs and birds, the archosaurs, crawled to the ground. However, the great Permian extinction mowed down most of the large theromorphs, opening the way for almost two hundred million years for the archosaurs, before whom the first mammals crawled. Taking advantage of the tragedy of their competitors, the archosaurs quickly increased their mass and since then have left our ancestors no room for evolution. Flowering plants, extremely effective due to symbiosis with bees and butterflies, formed a turf with their roots, which retained the flow of soil minerals into the sea. Due to the lack of calcium, the shells of single-celled algae, which produce the bulk of oxygen in the atmosphere, fell to the bottom. From these shells, chalk mountains grew. And the terrible lizards could not withstand the oxygen starvation, which one day reached a critical point, and fell, clearing the way for our ancestors, whose descendants will teach children with the help of that very school chalk. Excess weight played a cruel joke on the dinosaurs, they suffocated. Beauty saved the world, and the descendants of the theromorphs continued the interrupted evolution, repeating the forms of the ancestors of the Permian period. Even with saber-toothed predators, the experiment was repeated … So instructed the professor.

“I’m afraid the dinosaurs died not from the beauty of the world of butterflies and flowers, but from a meteorite strike,” I sighed.

Suddenly a new idea came to me.

– Tell me, what do you remember about the most acute phase of that very interethnic conflict, because of which you had to feel guilty before the boy who sculpted dinosaurs?

The patient frowned.

– I was sitting by the kitchen window. The warm light from the incandescent lamp was on. It was a dark blue evening. I saw scarlet tracer bullets in the sky and heard the roar of explosions. My parents came and took me to the living room. The machine guns were chattering, you could hear them in the living room no worse than in the kitchen. I don’t remember anything else. Well, the machine guns were cracking for many days in a row. They were blowing up the TV tower… And that winter there was a thick snowfall in Baku. I remember that on New Year’s Eve they showed a film about the adventures of Elektronik, snowflakes were swirling in the air, then a blizzard arose. It’s so rare that nature gives such a gift to Baku residents – snow… The first days of January we played a lot of snowballs with the kids. But all this happened during the holidays. And the troops were brought in later…

– What were you doing in the kitchen?

– I embroidered. I was into embroidery. We embroidered scarves. We cut a square piece out of a white sheet, pulled out threads from the edges to make fringe…

– What exactly did you embroider?

– I don’t remember. Maybe a butterfly, or a flower… I loved embroidering butterflies and flowers.

– What did you do with this embroidery?

– I don’t remember, I probably gave it to relatives or a friend, or I could have taken it to school because I took part in a competition…

– I will need as much information as possible about your relatives and classmates, about the school you attended, about the addresses you lived at and visited during that period in Baku.

– Are you seriously planning to fly to Baku to find the embroidery?

– Yes, there could be an important clue lost here that will help us unravel the keys to your memory.

– You will have to conduct a whole investigation… Moreover, Baku must be far away. And these are the affairs of such long-past years…

– Quite far. And a very long time ago. Not as far, of course, as an island in the Mesozoic… No problem, we have long arms.

– You? Who the hell are you, doctor? Where am I?

– Let's discuss your life in Baku in January 1990. What happened to Ruslan, Rustam, and Fidan later?

– Ruslan flew to America, Rustam stayed in Baku, Fidan went to Volgograd.

For the rest of the session I was pulling information out of her with pincers.

“It seems we forgot about the Mesozoic, doctor,” the patient pointed out.

– We will definitely return to the Jurassic beach. But… Next time.

While the investigation was ongoing, I was stalling for time. I personally visited the school where the amnesiac studied. I spent half a day rummaging through the archive cabinet with children's crafts, but did not find what I was looking for.

“How did you do at school?” I asked during my next visit to the ward.

– The teachers thought I was a good student. There were no Cs, and no A's towards the end either. I even got a B in physical education. I took part in organizational work, ever since they tied the pioneer tie. And then, when they took off the ties, in 1991…

– Did you enjoy studying?

– As a child, yes. And then it became boring. Boring subjects, that nasty squeaky chalk that gets your hands dirty, stuffy classmates…

– Did your classmates like you?

– I don't think so. I have crooked legs. And Bakuvians are prone to foot fetishism.

She made a “cheese” like an actress on the cover of a glossy magazine. I was even a little embarrassed. I had seen the patient's wound, but it would never have occurred to me to evaluate her legs in terms of their suitability for the catwalk.

– The Mesozoic is a different matter? You shone like a star there?

– Well, not exactly a star, but thanks to the professor, every day became different from the other. Like good Goodwin, he…

– Did your feelings for the professor fill your life with meaning?

– Yes, but not only that. It was really interesting and great. Imagine, one day we are cooking belemnites, and you know, they resemble squid not only in appearance but also in taste, and the next day you might come across a sauropod… It was nibbling a fern in a valley surrounded by a coniferous forest on the right and a ginkgo grove on the left. There was a time when the professor and I watched a fight between a ceratosaurus and an allosaurus on the edge of a forest that suddenly spread out before us. Without saying a word, we decided to retreat, backing away, without making any noise…

– Have you met the professor with your hands?

– In terms of?

– Did your fingers touch in a common task or in a man’s handshake?

The patient shook her head.

– I touched him with my curls.

– Yes.

– There was a stegosaurus, humpbacked and with triangular scutes on its back, Ruslan sculpted one like that at school, and also a scary pterosaur, when it sits on the ground – as tall as a desk, toothy, with a beak thickened at the end, like pincers. It’s disgusting, like a bird from a Miyazaki cartoon! And how wonderful were the evenings with the professor on the beach, at sunset! Everything in me trembled when I went down the ramp, holding on to the railing, trying to remember the steps. I loved waiting for my idol on a huge araucaria stump, the tree had been cut down for firewood before me… I hesitate for a long time to take a dip, and the professor loved to splash me with water. I screamed, and then we jumped together under the crest of the waves, laughed, splashing in the turbulent water and accelerated, pushing off with our feet along with the rolling foamy waves. And finally, happy, wrapped in a towel, I climbed up the same ladder to lie under a blanket, reading a book… And in a storm, everyone gathered together in the wardroom, played poker… The light was on… Spices wafted from the kitchen…

– How long did you live in the Mesozoic?

– About two months, from what I remember.

– What have you been doing all this time?

– We were looking for a flower.

– What did the search consist of?

– We wandered through hills and valleys, through forests, with a compass and a map, looking under our feet. But we saw only ferns, mosses and coniferous growth.

– How did it all end? Of course, I know from the doctors. But I would like to hear from you personally.

– The professor caught an unknown virus somewhere. He had a fever, he was hot. At the same time, he refused to return to Minsk, not wanting to infect people in the future. But I hoped that he simply did not want to abandon an unfulfilled mission. So, trying to convince him to return, I looked for the flower alone. Once I went many kilometers from the camp, passed a pine forest and came across a swamp. The dark waters seemed to be sprinkled with pale pink crumbs for Easter cakes. My heart started pounding, I ran. My feet got wet in an instant. It was it! Nanjinganthus dendrostyla! The harbinger of the distant collapse of the dragon kingdom and the beautiful human distance! Such small scarlet flowers, a centimeter in diameter. Petals, like an iris, on a thick peduncle, a huge pistil, similar to a small green tree, towered above the corolla. My head was spinning, like Ellie's in the poppy field, and I began to pick the bouquet, forgetting the doctor's warning not to do this under any circumstances, because of the “butterfly effect.” An angry bee emerged from the inflorescence and stung me painfully on the lip. I remembered the doctor's warning and ran towards him as fast as I could. And then a ceratosaurus jumped out of the forest.

– The same one who grabbed your leg?

“Yes,” the patient’s lips stretched into a guilty smile.

– What did he look like?

– So scary, with madly rotating round eyes, all lumpy, dark, like a demon from childhood nightmares, those creatures that you are afraid live under the bed when your parents leave you alone to sleep. I was scared, and he rushed at me, grabbed my leg, pulled me into the forest. I came to my senses, took the gun out of the holster and put a bullet in his eye. Then the lizard let go of me and ran away. Hellish pain in my leg seemed to grow like black wood to the teeth. I crawled along the shore, looking for the dropped radio, but I could not find anything in the thickets of ferns. And then it got dark, the Milky Way lit up in the sky, and the crickets began to trill. And so I crawled all the next day, losing strength. I thought that the radio was lost near the forest, rushed there and there realized that I did not have the strength to return to the swamp to get a drink. I don’t remember how many days I spent near the forest, I was tormented by a wild thirst, when the professor came running. He dragged me to the swamp. No matter how bad I felt, all this time I was tightly clutching the bouquet in my hand. The last thing I remember is lying on the professor’s lap, facing the fern-covered ground. It seems to me that the professor was radiating heat, he never recovered. He babbled that I shouldn’t take the flowers because of the “butterfly effect”, they were sought out in order to take them under protection, because there may be other civilizations that have mastered time travel, and that now I would have to demand access to the time machine, if I, of course, wanted to see him again, about the fact that I was dehydrated… He scooped up some stinking swamp liquid in his cupped hand and brought it to my face. I don’t remember if I drank any water… I woke up here, with you…

“Do you like our lemonade?” I asked.

“Oh yes, your lemonade is just like from my Soviet childhood!” she laughed, and I echoed her with a ringing laughter.

I also tried to interview her about her life during her school years, but the most interesting thing the patient told me was how there was a fire on the fifth floor of the school, and the black piano burned to the ground. The children were deprived of singing lessons for two months until a new piano was delivered.

I asked her about her life after school. However, her further existence left only boring stories about corporate parties, quarrels with husbands, about how her son ran away from home, or how her daughter got married and soon got divorced…

And so it went on until the day I finally got my hands on the embroidery. When I saw the product, I understood everything.

“We found that scarf,” I told the patient.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Look,” I twirled the dust-yellowed fabric before her brown eyes. “Here is a dove of peace and the flag of the Soviet Union. On the left in the corner is embroidered in calligraphic handwriting: ‘Peace to the world!’, and on the right – ‘January 20, 1990’. Is this your work?”

– Yes… I remember… You found it at school? Why are you covering the top of the embroidery with your palm?

I let go of my fingers and the handkerchief ended up in her hands.

– It says here: “To Ruslan from Lyudmila.” He took the gift with him to America. Don't you remember anything?

– I never liked him.

– Ah, that's what you mean! You didn't like him because of his mother's nationality. But you were in the same class, and before the political conflict, you might have treated the future outcast differently, what do you think?

– What could I feel for him?

– What could you feel about him? And what could you feel about the country you were born in? Perhaps you felt about this boy who sculpted dinosaurs the same way you felt about the professor in the Mesozoic? The whole world, you know?

– This is some kind of mistake! I loved Rustam! Maybe I just felt sorry for Ruslan, because of his mother's nationality, and when tanks were driving through the streets of Baku, in a fit of emotion I decided to support him?

– Did you notice the three scarlet hearts embroidered with outlines, each pierced by an arrow? And you remembered Ruslan after the curfew was lifted, when classes at school resumed. After all, you made him a gift with your own hands.

– And what do you think happened next?

– The holidays happened, and in the summer, having time to think, you soberly assessed the political significance of your feelings.

The patient's eyes widened. I thought that her gaze now matched her own descriptions of the eyes of a ceratosaurus.

“It was there and then,” I said, “not in the Mesozoic and not in front of the hospital. I mean the feeling.”

– But what was in front of the hospital then?

I read horror in her eyes.

– You must remember on your own.

I went to the window. Of all the fashionable discourses, I can't stand lamentations about worlds. But I can talk about it. The world is distinguished by its internal consistency. Take the inner world of a person, the world between people who share the same values, or at least the world of a science fiction novel. Of course, I went too far when I told her that she had soberly assessed the political significance of her feelings. It is unlikely that the unfortunate woman imagined that the conflict she had experienced was only a link in a chain of local conflicts, a chain stretching across space and time, a chain ending in the destruction of the civilization of planet Earth. She was lucky. At the time of the nuclear bomb's arrival, she was on the outskirts of Minsk, not at the very epicenter of the explosion. Panic arose in the surviving part of the city, a riot began. She was wounded in the leg by a grenade fragment from one of the marauders. All of them, from Scandinavia to South Africa, from Alaska to Portugal, soon calmed down under the flakes of nuclear snow. I saw these flakes when I wandered in a spacesuit along the streets of dead Baku to study the contents of a closet in the school where Lyudmila Sidorova studied many years ago. We have been watching them from space for a long time and were unable to prevent the catastrophe. Of course, we are trying to preserve the remains of civilization, taking survivors like her to our planets. They will never be able to develop independently, but, like rare animals in protected areas, they will be able to exist among us… We are trying to treat them for radiation sickness, for mechanical and mental damage. But I am not Goodwin from an earthly fairy tale. And not the wizard from the land of Oz. It seems that the surviving large archosaurs – saltwater crocodiles, were in solidarity with the American authors of the impact hypothesis of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction of ancient archosaurs, having destroyed one thousand two hundred and fifteen Japanese soldiers on Ramree Island a few months before the impact events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Impact is on the side of good, and every hypothesis has an author, right? What, you didn’t know that the author of the impact hypothesis of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction developed the atomic bomb and studied the consequences of its use in Hiroshima? A-za-za! Yes, I was deeply immersed in their lost world. She was conscious that night when our “saucer” arrived for her. The coquette clearly saw the rescuers in spacesuits. So… If aliens exist, why shouldn’t a time machine exist, right? It’s logical, right? The time loop explains everything! And Lyudmila Gennadievna remains in the world with herself.

I was really hoping to hear her scream of horror, but she said:

– You can torture me, but I will not renounce my memories of the Mesozoic and the professor. Our grandfathers from the Soviet Union were tortured by the fascists, but Malchish-Kibalchish did not reveal the military secret to the bourgeoisie.

She outlived her own children. And the world is hers. What else can a doctor do?

—

Author: Dmitry Tyulin