Classics fantasy – 9. A. Belyaev

by leaps and bounds. Incidence is brought almost to naught.

      – Electric chickens – smiling, I say.

      – Whether still you will see – the foreman answers. – Our production does not stop all the year round as hens rush also in the winter not less, than in the summer.

      – Surprisingly! – I told, with admiration looking at thousands of fluffy zheltenky chickens, cheerfully and busy pottering about in boxes.

      – Perhaps, electricity is designed to play the most important role in agriculture? – I told.

      The foreman looked at me with some regret – so it seemed to me – small consciousness such supposedly at the person!

      – So only the narrow expert of old time can argue – he answered. – We are dialecticians, and we are not escaped by the general communication of the phenomena. Electrical equipment, chemistry, physics, agronomics, botany, biology, bacteriology, meteorology – everything has the price the same as both air, and a sunlight, and water, and mineral fertilizers are important for plants. Everything is equally important. Take away one – and the plant will die in spite of the fact that it will be provided to all rest enough. Here you get acquainted with companion Boyko, the chemist of our experimental agricultural station. Talk to it. He will tell you about agrochemistry so much that, I am sure, the chemistry will seem to you the most important in agriculture. But neither he, nor I so we do not think.

      We came back to a garage where I had to get to work and study soon.

      – You are free tonight? – the foreman asked me.

      – Absolutely.

      And so that. You still will manage to go to Realovka. And today you come by eight o’clock to club. I will show you the movie on which all moments of the electrified processing of the earth in one of our best collective farms are photographed. Look.

      In the same evening I saw how huge electric plows crashed into the earth and turned off layer behind layer. I saw how behind them as if I infantry after artillery preparation, send “to finish the enemy” other cars which broke earth lumps. The third cars scattered fertilizers, the fourth sowed, exactly, carefully, accurately, the fifth mowed, reaped, connected and brought sheaves of wheat and a linking of hay from the field. No, not hay, and a fresh grass which went to a huge silo where electric current killed bacteria.

      Over fields flew airplanes, and a part of sowing was made from airplanes. Other airplanes sprayed a poison for wreckers.

      I saw the electric threshers giving pure, full grain. At last, I saw how electricity filled with grain huge elevators.

      “Where – I thought – the overstraining horses, the exhausted bulls poured pbty the mowers, women who are unsteady for fatigue, exhausted nursing right there on a field flabby children?. Instead of them – everywhere cars, and near cars and by cars are visible the dexterous, healthy, surely working collective farmers in the blue working overalls splashed by lubricating oil”.

      I admit, I did not see a picture of more fascinating. It is deification of power, the equipment, electrification, the organized work triumphing over forces majeure of the nature…

      Be healthy. Write. Your Karl Ernst”.

      Letter the third

      “Dear Lenz!

      The foreman was right: when I visited at the agrochemist Boyko, I was ready to prozakladyvat the head that the most important in agriculture is a chemistry.

      Met me by Boyko in chemical laboratory of experimental station.

      – Came to us to work? – he asked, giving me a hand. It was in the gray dressing gown burned by acids.

      At laboratory tables stood in dressing gowns of the young man and girl, they pottered with torches, flasks, glasses, overtook, boiled, cooled…

      In the certain room – a sanctuary where chemical gases do not come – under glass boxes there are chemical scales.

      – Pay attention: that concussion of the soil did not affect them, scales stand not on tables, and on the shelves attached to walls. There is our last Soviet achievement – with pride told Boyko, lifting a glass box from brand new scales. – Tear off a scrap of a piece of paper and throw on scales.

      I made it. Quickly weighed a scrap, removed from scales, stretched to me and told:

      – Now write on a scrap a pencil your surname.

      I executed also it. Quickly again put a scrap on scales. And that: scales noted an increase in weight from a short pencil inscription.