1

Of course, Gel’ka didn’t know that Yurka wanted to return to Starogorsk, but he could not. When Yurka suddenly felt a longing for Gel’ka, for Yanka and Starogorsk, he said to Gleb, “Gel’ka may think that I just left him there. I guess, I should’t…” Then he just said goodbye to Gleb and went back along the rails. He walked for a long time, but the lights of Starogorsk, which seemed close, suddenly melted into the air. Yurka looked around. Gleb was no longer behind.Yurka was standing on the railroad tracks in a field, where birds began to whistle in the grass. He was alone. “Should've thought of it earlier,” Yurka said to himself. “Now just walk forwards.” He was going along the rails, whistling a tune. He walked fast and the morning playful breeze blew his drummer aiguillette on his shirt.

***

Gel’ka and Yanka walked home from school. It was late September, but the days were still warm. It was completely calm. Fluffy seeds of snowflake grass seemed to hang motionless in the air. Small daisies bloomed in the wasteland, and butterflies fluttered across them. The sun was still warming their shoulders through their shirts, but not strongly; it was like a gentle touch of a warm hand before it said goodbye. Gel’ka was in a relaxed mood on such days and his anxiety about the fate of Yurka had temporarily died down. He still hoped that everything was going to be okay.

Gel’ka said, “Let's go to the river, Yanka...”

“Why? The water is cold now," Yanka answered.

“I'm not going to swim. Why can't we just sit on the cliff?”

"What?" Yanka stopped.

"Are you all right, Yanka?"

Yanka wrinkled his face, shook his head and said, “I'm just…”

He quickly sat on the edge of the stone pavement and grabbed his knees. Gel'ka sat next to Yanka. His relaxed mood disappeared. Gel'ka didn't ask anything. He was waiting for what Yanka had to say.

Yanka slowly raised his head and whispered, "Now I understand why I felt dizzy recently..."

"What?"

“Remember, I became afraid of heights? It happens to all the Windies before they start flying. It's always like this. We are very afraid of heights at first, but this fear must be overcome.... I remember everything now. Now I know exactly what's going on. "

"Yanka, I do not understand..."

"I'm not Yanka."

Gel'ka said very gently, trying not to show his fright, "Let's go home slowly. I think you caught a cold or something when we were in the junkyard last time...."

"Gel’ka, I'm really not Yanka."

“Then who are you?”

"My name was Daniel. My mom called me Dan. Then everyone began to call me that...”

"Well, okay. Let's go to your mom..."

"No, I'm not talking about my present mom. The mom I am talking about is gone," Yanka said quietly.

"Look, Twinkle and Vaska are coming over. Let us take you home."

Yanka quickly got up and pulled back his hair. He now seemed somehow unfamiliar, as if he had grown older. Yanka said to Gel’ka quietly, but firmly, “We’d better go to your place. Let’s climb onto the roof of your house where we won't be bothered and I can tell you everything.”

They talked for the rest of the day. The dusk arrived early in September, so it was chilly outside, but there was heat coming from the energy collector on the roof. The first stars appeared in the sky.

Yanka sadly said, “

Since the very beginning, I felt that Yurka was going to leave and that I had to help him. It was my special mission. Do you think I accidentally sent the wagon down the track using the energy of the Sparky? I didn't explain it to myself, but I just felt I had to. It all happened ahead of time because Gleb appeared. There was no way of knowing this was going to happen. Well, who would have thought that the journalist Gleb Vjatkin would appear in Starogorsk from nowhere? Just at this moment, everything went wrong.”

“Maybe it's still not too late,” Twinkle said. He and Vaska were silent almost all the time.

“No, the moment is gone,” Yanka said with annoyance. “Right now, in September, I had to take Yurka to his father when I remembered everything. His father asked me to learn something about Yurka, to bring news for him, but all the Windies decided that this wouldn’t be the way. They decided that we should get Yurka out of here, to the Planet before he grows up and send him forty years into the future through all these damn space and time fields. But I failed my mission."

"But it's not your fault," Gel’ka said.

“What does it matter? Yurka will never meet his father," Yanka said with tears in his eyes, and banged his fist on the energy collector. “If he was with us during the uprising at the naval school, then he didn’t find his father Yar, don't you understand it? Now I know that the boy we knew by the nickname Musician was Yurka.... The uprising was forty years before Yar appeared on the Planet.”

“How is that even possible?” Gel’ka asked and shook his head. "Yurka left us a month and a half ago. It's impossible." This is not the first time he had said this.

Yanka replied sadly, " That can only mean one thing: Those who command have made time in a closed circle and we're stuck in an infinite loop."

“Are these the ones that were the clowns?” Twinkle whispered and moved closer to Gel’ka.

“Yes, they're the ones,” Gel’ka said.

“How did they do that to time? They don’t teach us this stuff in school.” Twinkle said.

“No one understands this,” Yanka-Dan said and sighed. "But now it’s clear that they did, and everything goes like a dizzy merry-go-round."

Gel’ka frowned as if he was solving a puzzle. "Yanka, but but if you go back in time... When you get there, you could meet Yar and explain to him that Yurka has become a Windy and that he is in the Empty City. Then they can be seen, at least for a while..."

“I won't be able to do all this,” Yanka said wearily. “I'm trapped in an infinite loo, just like all of you. I'll be loop back to the starting point and it starts all over again: the Shores War, my mother and I will be on the sinking steamship, then I’ll be getting knocked back by the explosion… Then the naval school and the uprising… Then we, the boys, which have become the Windies, have been flying around for so many years. Finally – the snow-covered meadow, Yar and his friends and I fly here. I become a baby and live in Primorsk city, then here in Starogorsk, and start all over again. It seems to me that we've gone over this a thousand times. Over and over and over again.”

Alyosha-Twinkle was very confused by Yanka’s story. He asked Yanka,” Why did you have to turn into a baby?”

Yanka said with a sigh, “If a Windy wants to turn into a human for a long time, he first has to turn into a baby. It's not bad at all. That's what every Windy really wants deep down. It's so good when you are a real kid again and you have a house and a family... It's called ‘go into foundlings’. Some of the Windies do that.”

"So why don't all the Windies do that?" Gel’ka asked.

"Some of us don’t know how, but many are just afraid to..." Yanka answered.

"Is it dangerous?"

"No. Nothing can harm the Windies at all. But when the time comes to fly away and when you know that you will never see your family again, it gets unspeakably lonely."

“But why do you have to fly away?" Twinkle asked.

“It is a rule of nature. If you are a foundling and if you are as old as you were before you had turned into a Windy, then you have remember everything and it takes you back..."

“How old were you when you turned into a Windy?” Gel’ka asked with a sinking heart.

"On the day of the uprising I was exactly twelve. And I’ll be twelve in a week..."

“What are you going to tell your family?”

“I’m not going to tell anything to mom and dad. They might not be grieving too much. They know that I’m not their own son...”

“They'll be grieving anyway,” Gel’ka thought.

"I’ve told my grandfather. He loves me more than anybody else," Yanka said.

“So how did your grandpa react?”

Yanka lay down on the plastic roof cap and answered, “He hugged me and said:"I thought that might happen. You know, soon I will die, but you fly until the loop of time is be broken..."

“Do you think that would ever happen?” Gel’ka asked.

“No one knows.We did our best, but we are almost out of time.” Yanka said sadly.

Suddenly, there was a loud metal scraping. Vaska moved down from the roof crest on his hard back along the ribbed plastic surfice. So far he had been sitting up there and hadn’t said a word.

He turned on his purple photocell eyes and said, “Why not?”

“What do you mean?" Gel’ka said and frowned.

"Why don't we break this infinite loop?" Vaska ansered.

"Vaska, you are a smart robot, but you still have little knowledge of physics," Gel’ka said in a preaching tone of voice. "This is the loop of time. Where is it? How can you grab it?"

“There is no need to grab it,” Vaska answered in his special robotic voice; in that voice he spoke when he was capricious or was boasting. "There must be a model."

Yanka jumped up and asked, "What?"

Vaska got up and turned on a light bulb at the top of the energy collector. He put his rubber palms into the pockets of his sailor suit.

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“I know physics five hundred times better than you,” Vaska said casually. "The day before yesterday I read the seven-volume book of Doctor of Physical Sciences Laptev, and yesterday the General Theory of Space by Professor Okayama..."

Vaska started to go back and forth. His pants were torn at the back from his movement along the roof, but this did not bother the robot.

“I've been listening to you for quite a while now,” Vaska said. “I shut down my emotional block so as not to worry with you. When everybody else is upset and whimpering, at least one person should to be thinking clearly."

“Stop pacing like that!” Gel’ka said. “Sit down and quit stalling!”

“Got it. In fact, these creatures, the name of which is not precisely defined - “clowns”, “mannequins”, “Those who order” - they cannot work without a model. They needed the Sparky, like a model, to influence our galaxy. Without it, they still can’t do anything. But they are able to curle up time. And I'm sure they have a model of that somewhere - it is something like a ring road. If we break their closed loop model, the time loop breaks by itself."

"But where can this model be? But where to find it?" Yanka asked.

“You've got to think!” Vaska said smugly.

“Do you have any idea?” Gel’ka asked quickly.

“Of course. A train. A train to Bridge station."

At first, everyone was silent. Then Alyosha-Twinkle asked Vaska, "What Bridge station?"

They all stood on the roof around Vaska.

“The train goes through several parallel spaces, at least three,” Yanka said. “What's interesting is it always goes in one direction. Well, this is definitely the ring road.”

“Doesn't the train go back when it arrives Bridge station?” Gelka asked.

Yanka shook his head and said, “There is no Bridge station. No one has ever seen it.”

"No, there is," Vaska said sagely. “But the station is extended in time as well as in space, in multiple demensions. The entire railroad is Bridge station. It's not about the train, but about the rail track itself. It is their time loop model.”

Yanka pulled himself up to his full height and it seemed to Gelka as if the music "Uprising" began to play. Yanka said, “Great, so we’ll blow it up!”

“But where?” Gel’ka asked.

Vaska said, "The station is extended in space, but there is still the Bridge."

“Oh ...” Alyosha-Twinkle muttered. "So this is the bridge near the junkyard?!"

2

The first time they saw the Bridge was in August. There was a bright full moon that night. They had been going through the junkyard among old cars, broken refrigerators, rusty pipes and radiators all day long. They found all kinds of fun and weird stuff and different parts for Vaska, who wasn’t built yet. They needed to get home, but Alyosha-Twinkle fell hard and scraped his arm.

Gelka said, “We need to go to the old women to wash that thoroughly and apply a proper dressing. Of course, they will gripe, but they will help anyway.”

The old women lived in tin Gypsy carts on the edge of the junkyard. They lived close together, in dust and rust. That’s probably why they were called ‘the Rusty Witches’ or maybe because they were really able to do magic.

A tall gray-haired witch who wore a scarf around her neck named Elvira Galaktionovna, indeed, started grouching at the guys, but not for long. She put on Alyosha’s arm something cold and effervescent, and his skin had healed over right in front of their eyes. Then she slipped melted candies into the kids’ hands and said with a made-up angry look, “Now, young men, go home. We got our own things going on over here. You don’t have to look at our old ladies' stuff. It's a full moon, so grannies are going to start dancing. And on that note, au revoir.”

"Thank you, goodbye," the guys said obediently. But when they left the witch’s cart, Gelka whispered, “Let's go see what they are doing, okay?”

They had never seen rusty witches dance, only heard about it from the robot Jeremy, Vaska’s father. No one knew where the rusty witches came from or why they lived in the world. Rumor had it that a long time ago, there was a gypsy camp at the site of the junckyard and the old women have been here since the dawn of time…

The guys made their way to the "dance floor", hiding behind piles of scrap metal . It was a wasteland on the southern edge of the junkyard. There were weeds growing chin high in that place. Here and there, empty barrels of grease and gasoline stuck out among the weeds.

They were dug in, waiting.

The Witches hobbled to empty fuel barrels. The hems of their wide gypsy skirts clung to thorns of weeds. Their plastic beads glittered dimly in the moonlight. There were six witches. Each of them went up to her barrel, stretched wierdly and froze for a while, then, as if they were thrown from below, flew up and landed on the round iron base. The barrel made a hollow sound.

"What are they doing?" Alyosha-Twinkle whispered. He was in the junckyard for the first time and was a bit scared.

Gelka answered him quietly, "Do not be afraid... Nothing wrong with that, even though they are witches."

For a moment the old women froze, standing on the empty barrels. They seemed to be statues in an abandoned park against the moonlit sky.

Suddenly one of them hit the barrel with her boot heel. Another one answered her. Then several old women stomped at once. Then more and more ... The heels beating on the buzzing barrel iron turned into a roar, but soon a rhythmic stamping was formed. It was a ragged melody of a quick expressive dance such as flamenco. The witches threw up their disheveled heads, moved their arms up intensely, and then bent at their waists. Their wide skirts flutter around them like flames and the iron rhythm caused by their lightning-fast footwork boomed over the wasteland...

“This is brilliant,”Yanka whispered. “To a three-four time signature.”

The rusty witches dance was rattling loudly and spreading across the junkjard under the moonlight sky. Slowly, it began to seem not so loud and the rhythm pattern had become more sophisticated, more beautiful. Through the booming blows, a group of small measures became audible, which were intertwined and overtaking each other... Then a strange hum penetrated into the dance from a distance. It was like the increasing noise of an approaching train. Where could it have come from? There were no railways nearby. Gelka, Yanka and Twinkle looked at each other.

Meanwhile, a bridge arose in the pale moonlight beyond the wasteland a hundred meters from the dancing rusty witches. The huge black bridge with no beginning and no end that looked like a giant gate. Its blurry edges were dissolved into the air. Then a train had appeared at the far end of the bridge. It was an old-fashioned locomotive with the spotlight. It raced along rails with wooden sleepers and rattled its metal wheels at the junctions. A smoke plume rose above the train firebox. The locomotive pulled black wagons with platforms at the back and front.

The string of lights flashed past the surprised guys. It wasn’t a mirage. The wobbling sound of the train wheels was so loud that they were deafened. The smell of burning сoal hit their noses.But the rusty witches' dance was throbbing to its own frenetic rhythm as if nothing had happened.

image [http://www.rusf.ru/vk/pict/sterligo/golubjatnja_na_jeltoi_poljane_22.gif]

Sometimes, when adults face an unexplained phenomenon, they get scared and just pretend that nothing happened. Gelka, Yanka and Alyosha-Twinkle couldn’t do that. The following night, they hid in the thickets of weeds and grandmother's beads grass on the southern edge of the wasteland. The rusty witches danced again, and the bridge materialized out of thin air. This time the bridge was very close to the guys.

“Let’s go!” Gelka said, although he was scared. They rushed to the bridge, and, as always, the dry berries of the grandma’s beads grass whipped their legs.

The columns of the bridge were made of rough cubes of rock and the mica flakes in granite sparkled in the moonlight. Gelka touched the stone. The granite was wet and cold. The rusty step irons were driven into the gaps between the bridge stone blocks, so the bridge columns could be used as a ladder, a way up to the railroad track, which was fenced with thin railings. The bridge's height was great - about thirty meters. And then the train passed on the bridge again with a long rumbling sound.

"Another mystery of Starogorsk," Gelka said.

The witches kept their wild dancing.

Half a minute passed, and the bridge disappeared - instantly, without a sound, as if nothing had happened.

...The next day, Gelka casually asked Elvira Galaktionovna, "What's the bridge, which appears at night? And there's a train..."

“What, were you spying on us?” the witch Elvira asked angrily.

"No. On our way back home from the junkyard, we looked back and saw a huge bridge..."

“How do you like that!” another witch named Taisya said. She was fat and good-natured in appearance.”Nothing special about it. Well, we are not really sure what it is. As soon as we start dancing on a full moon, the bridge comes out of nowhere. Forget it.”

"Maybe it's some kind of resonance phenomenon?" Yanka whispered to Gelka.

“You talk too much.” Elvira said. “All right, now get out.”

They understood that breaking the temporal loop meant destroying the Bridge. They also believed that this was the only way things would fall into place: Yurka would find his father, Yanka-Dan would no longer be burning in the fire at the fortress, Gleb would turn up, the friends would meet and the ‘clowns’ and the ‘mannequins’ would bite the dust or just run away somewhere. And a lot of good things probably would happen -- exactly what was still unclear to them, but it didn’t matter. The main thing for them was to blow up the Bridge. But with what?

“This thing's so big you'd practically need an A-bomb to destroy it," Gelka said hopelessly.

Vaska let out a small sound like a grunt and said, “We don’t need to blow up the entire bridge. All we have to do is explode the rails. To do that, we need a very small bomb.”

Alyosha-Twinkle snickered and said to Vaska, “Are you going to buy it in a toy store?”

“Just leave it to me,” Vaska answered mysteriously.

The next day, after school, Vaska had dragged an iron ball the size of a small watermelon in Gelka’s backyard. The ball was badly rusted and weighed probably no less than twenty kilograms. Vaska’s duralumin legs bent and gave away when he dragged such a heavy thing. Vaska dropped the ball into the grass near Duplex’s kennel. Old Duplex got out of his kennel, sniffed around an unfamiliar thing and licked Vaska’s belly. The dog loved the robot.

Gelka looked at the rusty ball suspiciously and asked, “What is this thing? A sinker, ha-ha?”

“Okay, ha ha, very funny. No. It’s a cannonball,” Vaska said.

“Do you want to blow up the rails with this old cannonball?” Gelka asked. “Vaska, you dummy. This is not a bomb; it won’t blow up without gunpowder.”

Vaska did not answer. He looked his disdain to Gelka’s words. He scraped rust off the cannonball and put it noisily in a Duplex’s bowl.

“And what's that for?” Gelka asked.

“This is a millstone,” Vaska said in a matter-of-fact way. “Go and pick snowflake grass seeds.”

“What would I do that for?”

“Less talk, more action,” Vaska ordered.”I’ll make an explosive composition from the seeds.”

“How many megatons it might it be?” Gelka asked mockingly.

“Don't get smart with me!” Vaska said. “I stole an old book from the rusty grandmas and it says that the explosive power of the earth is inside of the seeds of snowflake grass.”

Gelka suddenly remembered-- if you lay the seed capsule in the fist and wait for a while, so ‘bang’ -- it opens explosively from the body heat and your fingers open themselves, dispersing fluffy flying seeds.

Gelka was a little ashamed. He joyfully rushed to the fence; there were oodles and oodles of snowflake grass along it. Yanka and Twinkle came along and started helping Gelka to pick the seeds. Then Vaska rotated the cannonball in the bowl, grinding the seeds into dust. Duplex observed the work with his head bent. Sometimes he sneezed from the fine fluff that flew over the homemade mill.

Then Vaska brought a rusty thimble from somewhere. He showed it to the guys and explained that this would be around one charge. The ancestors of the rusty witches broke thick chains with such charges as they fled from the cave of the iron dragon.

“But we are dealing with the ring road. Five charges are needed,” Yanka said

“And what makes you think that?” Vaska asked.

“Believe me. ‘Those who command’ are afraid of the number five,”Yanka answered.

“Then bring me more seeds,” Vaska said.

By nightfall, the flour from snowflake grass seeds was ready and they mixed it with the grandma’s beads grass juice, following the rusty witches’ recipe book.

It was too late and Aunt Vika looked out the window and called to have dinner.

Finally, they filled five checker pieces with the resultant paste.

Vaska said that the paste should dry for three days.

“Are you sure we can make it before the full moon end?” Gelka asked.

“If we hurry, we can make it,” Yanka said and sighed. He only had five days left.

TO BE CONTINUED...