Classics fantasy – 9. A. Belyaev

assics fantasy – 9

      A. Belyaev

      © A. Belyaev, 2019

      ISBN 978-5-0050-1131-2 (т. 9)

      ISBN 978-5-0050-0936-4

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      THE EARTH BURNS

      1

      In the Business yard, in a reception of the chairman of VSNKh of the USSR, among visitors there was an elderly person with the face rubbed for years and life and in a shabby coat. Having taken seat in a corner, he sat not movably, expecting when reception begins.

      The door of an office opened, and the secretary looked out from there. It eyes recalculated turn of people with portfolios and papers in hands. Several people darted off and approached it. But the person was ahead of all in a shabby coat.

      – There will be a people’s commissar soon?

      – It has a meeting in Council of People’s Commissars today. To hours to four has to be. On urgent affairs the deputy accepts it.

      – I need the people’s commissar – the person impressively told and took seat on a chair with a look: I will die, but I will wait.

      At last it entered an office.

      – I listen to you – the people’s commissar shortly told.

      And the person in a shabby coat started talking. Its surname Mikheyev. He is an inventor. Its specialty – fight against the desert, against the terrible desert approaching the Soviet Union.

      He spoke passionately, being confused in words, losing the main idea. The huge amounts of solar energy which during the summer are made and скопляющиеся on the sandy and stony or only poorly covered by vegetation soil, have no other exit, except as on an ispepeleniye next, still live and inhabited lands. The earth burns.

      Any area where dry winds and not enough atmospheric precipitation blow, turns into the desert.

      What is seen by us in huge spaces of the Aralo-Caspian Sea? The Mga, Chmara, mosses – these “dry tears” and the reek of alcohol – saliva of dry deserts, with their destructive influence on life, on all vegetation, especially cultural and meadow. Flowers, without having blossomed, fade, without yielding a fruit or even perishing in kidneys… Grain ears and any cereals are empty and give weak умолот… Leaves on a grass and on trees turn yellow, falling down before time.

      In the Volga region, in the North Caucasus, in Ukraine… in Saratov, Stalingrad… And to Kiev… Kazan, Ryazan… the cities and lands are dimmed by dust storms in dry summer.

      – You have a project how to fight against the desert? – the people’s commissar who was patiently listening to his speech asked. And from a question Mikheyev somehow calmed down at once.

      – I am an engineer. And if I had no developed plan, I would not begin to take away from you time. Twelve years I worked on this idea. Collected huge material. At me everything is calculated, weighed, verified from the most general to the most slightest detail.

      – What your project consists in?

      – Piping of Volga. A barrage at Kamyshin.

      In a piping such level of new formation of the river when, on the one hand, cover with drift of its water huge spaces of the Zavolzhye steppes and deserts is established, recovering them, with a potusheniye in them “the fire of the earth”. On the other hand, in the river level on height which is not violating the main interests of the coastal cities and the population rises.

      – Your materials will be studied. Will report on results on me – the people’s commissar told, as if finishing a conversation. – You need to see one of members of board NKRKI of the USSR, to acquaint him with material, to report about difficulties which you met on the… Hallo… Yes, I…

      If now there was an inventor of phone Bell, Mikheyev would kill him, so he hated the “impolite invention” disturbing a business talk this minute.

      And from a reception the impatient engineer wearing spectacles and with a portfolio already looked, and the secretary already brought a heap of papers for the signature, and the people’s commissar already gave to Mikheyev a hand…

      2

      Desert… It burned horror heart in the childhood when Mikheyev was no more than twelve years old. He lived with the father, the territorial doctor, in the abandoned steppe village beyond Volga. The Mga, both Chmara, and dry fogs for the boy were not mere words. He grew up under the crimson sun as if choking in a haze of a dust storm. From dust there was no rescue. It covered with a gray raid leaves of trees of a lean garden, got into the house through the closed windows, powdered tables, beds, toys, climbed in but with, eyes, ears and lungs… And the dream was disturbing, as in time сирокко. There, behind fields, the desert as the animal ready to a jump hid. Her ominous sandy whisper was heard far.

      And suddenly she was loudly knocked at doors and grabbed by a throat with a bony hand of hunger. It was in the ninety first year of last century. Unforgettable year! The child could not be saved from terrible pictures of hunger, as from Chmara and a mga. And Mikheyev remembered this nightmare well.

      Began with the fact that at familiar men of the person became gray, eyes became hollow, the nose and cheekbones became aggravated, cheeks and a stomach were pulled in. Their bodies became flabby, puny, Mischa Mikheyev could not understand why it. And then many withered people suddenly began to grow stout strange white-yellow completeness.

      Mischa looked in windows of log huts. Almost in everyone the yellow spark of a candle in the dead man’s heads shone. But sparks went out soon: there were not enough candles, and dead men became more and more. Living people turned into corpses…

      The inflated corpses of animals on fields… Stench… Swarms of flies… Crying of the hungry street children who lost parents… And over all this is the hot, destructive sun and the dry fog covering with a shroud the world doomed to death…

      And behind the village there were adust fields. Dry, brown stalks powerlessly drove at the earth an empty ear. Burning wind burned them, sand brought. Over once corpulent fields sepulchral sandy hills grew. Dry ears as the last reminder on the perishing fields stuck out of these graves here and there.

      The desert killed all live… It cannot be forgotten!

      This horror did not leave his all life.

      Mikheyev dreamed the globe from big height. Here huge bald patch of the Sahara, here deserts of Turkestan, China… And all these bald patches slowly creep away extensively as leprosy… And here all globe turns into the desert. And the last people choke in a sandstorm without water and air…

      “I will be an engineer that knowledge to win against the desert” – young Mikheyev solved. He became the engineer hydrotechnician, but did not win against the desert. Many years he developed difficult systems of irrigation canals and threw them.

      – It is all the same what to try to put out the fire a spray! – he spoke in despair … – Only plentiful waters of Volga could put out the fire of the desert… And what, if?.

      3

      Mikheyev was in RKI loaded with huge folders with manuscripts, tables, schedules, maps, drawings.

      But at it something was more interesting than dead drawings. Mikheyev put on a table a korobishcha size in meter and in a brick thickness. There lay its expensive a child – “the materialized idea”. It was the relief of the Volga basin and the Caspian Sea made of mastic. Arable lands are painted in yellow color of ripe wheat, a meadow – in light green, and the woods – in dark green. From the East ominous brown languages of the coming desert put in the Zavolzhye fields. The riverbed of Volga and a bottom of the Caspian Sea were naked.

      In half an hour the room was turned into the peculiar laboratory filled with the audience.

      Mikheyev put the model edges on two tables, under model put an empty bucket, and full – on a table and through a rubber