"Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky. The Time Wanderers (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

of some interest even now...

Having made the final decision to write this memoir, I faced the
question: where do I begin? When and what started the Big Revelation?

Strictly speaking, it all began two centuries ago, when in the bevels
of Mars they discovered a deserted tunnel city of amberine. Mat was the
first time that the word "Wanderers" was spoken.

That is true. But too general. It could just as easily be said that the
Big Revelation began with the Big Bang.

Then perhaps it was fifty years ago? The affair of the "foundlings"?
When the problem of the Wanderers took on a tragic aspect, when the vicious
rebuking epithet "Sikorski Syndrome" was born and lived through word of
mouth? It was the complex of uncontrollable fear of a possible invasion by
the Wanderers. That's also true. And much more to the point... But back then
I was not yet head of the UE Department; in fact, it did not even exist. And
I am not writing a history of the problem of the Wanderers.

For me it began in May of 93, when I, like all the heads of the UEDs of
all the sectors of COMCON-2, received a circular report about the incident
on Tisse. (Not on the Tisse River, which flows peacefully through Hungary
and the Carpathians, but on the planet Tisse near the star EN-63061,
discovered not long before that by the fellows from GSP.) The circular
described the incident as a sudden and unexplained madness in all three
members of the research party, landing on the plateau (I can't remember the
name) two weeks earlier. All three suddenly imagined that they had lost
communication with the central base and had lost all communication in
general except with the orbiting mother ship, and the mother ship was
broadcasting an automatic message that Earth had been destroyed in some
cosmic cataclysm, and that the entire population of the Periphery had died
out from unexplained epidemics.

I don't remember all the details anymore. Two of the party, I think,
tried to commit suicide, and in the end went off into the desert in despair
over the hopelessness and total uselessness of further existence. Their
commander was a stronger man. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to
live -- as if humanity had not perished, but only he had suffered an
accident and had been cut off forever from his home planet. He later
recounted that, on the fourteenth day of this crazed life, someone dressed
in white appeared to him and announced that he had honorably passed the
first round of the trials and had been accepted as a candidate into the
society of Wanderers. On the fifteenth day, the lifeboat came from the
mother ship, and the atmosphere was discharged. They found the two men who
had gone off into the desert, everyone remained of sound mind, and no one
died. Their testimony was consistent down to the tiniest details. For
instance, they all reproduced exactly the accent of the automatic machine
that allegedly gave the fatal announcement. Subjectively, they perceived the
incident as a vivid, unusually authentic-seeming theatrical presentation, in