in my robe! He broke all my Chinese porcelain! The vases of the Ming Dynasty! Nobody had such, I collected them for five hundred years, and now I have only fragments!”
“No, no,” said Radogast. “Not mine. Your cosmonauts from Dhana brought this pest to Ra, and I took his life, as expected.”
“So you did it badly!” screeched Upyg. “Now I will take up the matter myself and will certainly finish him and his wife. And because you, Radogast, have allowed such an outrage, I demand from you to let me bring another person from Dhana. I need him for research for the month or two, and then I will order him to be killed. Do you agree? After all, for the next 50 thousand years I have to work on Dhana, so I must know in advance what kind of monsters are there. But if you don’t agree, I will complain to the Supervisory Board, and you will be as good as dead.”
“Okay!” Radogast agreed. “As you wish!”
“Then I give order to Semushka to urgently catch and kill this flier. Unfortunately, I cannot do this on my own; the status does not allow it.”
“I do not mind,” Radogast said, “but I doubt that he has a body that can be killed. The last time I saw him was only in the form of a spirit.”
“That is ok, my Semushka, with the help of the imprint of thoughts, finds not only alive, but also the dead. Such a talented boy! And I’ll send him the imprint right away.”
And then dad, apparently, realized that we were wasting our time, and sharply yanked us back to our bodies, to our car.
“Well,” he said, “the number two never leads to something good. Now, not only Semen, but all the main sorcerers of the country of demons will hunt for us. Both Upyg and Radogast are against us. Let’s urgently wake up mom, we’ll go to aunt Masha, maybe at least you can be saved.”
We woke up mom.
“What? Can we already go home?” Mom asked.
“No,” Papa answered, “the road to home is closed to us forever!”
As if in response to his words, two huge dark shadows drove to the intersection on the border of the city we left.
“Now the roads are blocked,” Papa said, “if you want to save your son, and then let’s hurry to aunt Masha.”
And we rushed off. We arrived the same night. Aunt Masha immediately realized that a rouble had happened. She fed us and put our mother to sleep, but my father and I refused. Dad had an idea how to save not only me but also my mother. He did not think about his own salvation, since this, he said, it was the fourth occasion, and he must necessarily die at the spell of Radogast, completely and irrevocably.
To save mother, he decided to conduct an anti-witchcraft to that witchcraft that separated my mother from aunt Masha at birth. He asked aunt Masha to lie down next to her mother. Then dad and I again connected and began to mentally bring together the two bodies lying in front of us: mom’s and aunt’s. Combining their second and third bodies, dad disconnected from me and said:
“Now hold them together, and I’ll try to unite mom and aunt Masha completely… We did it!” Sleeping mother easily passed from her body into the similar body of her sister. Dad carefully carried mother’s body away and put it into the car.
While we were doing this, aunt Masha dozed off, and dad suddenly saw a bundle of mom’s letters on her shelf. He collected them all, tied it together with the rest of the letters and his diary, packed everything in a bag and, having thought a little, put his favourite horn there too.
“That’s it,” he said, handing the bag to me, “goodbye, son! Go to Aunt Valya, give all these letters to her too and she will figure out where to hide them.” After that, he got into the car, quickly drove off and took mother’s body away.
I went to aunt Valya’s house. There was only Lyubochka. I said that we have trouble and that dad sent me to aunt Valya. Lyuba quickly contacted her mother mentally, even though her mother was many kilometers from home. Then she said that aunt Valya ordered me to go to bed and give letters to her. That’s exactly what I did.
I woke up because of the noise of motors outside the window. The street was full of soldiers; especially a lot of them were around the house of aunt Masha.
“If they come to us,” said Lyubochka, “crawl under the table and be silent. I will talk as my mother will tell me. Do not forget to put up protection, as in the game of hide and seek.”
Heavy steps were heard on the porch and who do you think came in? Semen Andreevich. In horror, I darted under the table.
“Hello, Lyubochka,” he said gently, “and who is it under your table?”
“This is my little brother,” Lyuba answered, “he is afraid of all strangers!”
“Where’s mom?”
“Mom is in the city. She passes the exam to become a doctor. She is a whole week there. And by the end of the week she asked us to go to her for the holidays. My brother has never seen a city.”
“Hm, it will be difficult for you to leave now, the whole village is cordoned off. However, I will give you a letter and an accompanying person; he will lead you to your mother.”
“Oh thank you! How kind you are! Mom always said that you are the most wonderful person in the world!” Semen Andreevich smiled:
“Well, see you!.. Hey Fedka! Here’s a pass for you, you will lead tomorrow these children to their mother, she in the city.”
Fedka saluted, looked indifferently at us and left after Semen Andreyevich.
“Now,” said Lyubochka, “we will save aunt Masha. Let’s join hands and try to make sure that no one receives a single reasonable word from aunt Masha, let everyone think that she is a complete fool. Then she will not be touched.”
That’s what we did. This turned out to be much easier than we thought. Aunt Masha was tired and really wanted to sleep, so it was very easy to get her to answer irrelevantly.
“Yesterday I was very tired. The calf was born. Spotty and funny like Pestruska. And then, at night, I dreamed of my little sister, as if she had come to me… Why are there so many dirty dishes on the table? I don’t have time to wash the dishes, at the weekend I’ll immediately wash everything… The shoes under the bed are sister’s, but if she actually was here at night, why did she leave the shoes? So she went barefoot or what?.. If you visit our farm, I’ll show you a calf, it is so funny!..”
Eventually, the interrogator spat:
“What can you expect of the fool!”
But events on the street continued to unfold. Three small cars skidded right through the meadow with great speed and sped off into the distance. These cars had no wheels; they seemed to fly above the ground.
“These are my beaters!” Semеn Andreevich said with pride.
He was sitting almost under our window in an open black car, and next to him was a general who answered:
“I prefer helicopters. Just in case, I called one. A volley of missiles is the end of all problems.”
“I want to take her alive. They say that she has a very unusual assistant, so the main thing is to get to him. Have you heard about the possibilities of a mental attack?”
“Well, that’s all fairy tales.”
“Not really, not really… A criminal who knows these methods is doubly dangerous. He can put into your head that he is not he at all, he can make you perform an action that you were not going to perform, and then forget about it. So don’t stop me from taking them alive. Now, if he mentally strikes me down, haha, then you can act by your own methods.”
Lyubochka and I nestled against the window and listened attentively to this