In the wasteland beyond the rail tracks, we dug a hole next to a concrete block that had been dropped into the ground. We put the mangled debris into the hole, covered it with earth, and placed some turf on top.

“Come on, write it down,” Yurka told me gloomily. "You used to work with brushes."

He gave me a brush and a can of black indelible paint.

"Just don’t write that he was a robot," Yanka told me.

I wrote on the concrete:

JEREMY

died on August 6, 210 S.A.

( * S.A -space age)

That was all. I threw the can far into the grass. I turned away so that no one could see my wet eyes. Everyone was silent. The radio played cheerfully at the station, and in the park there was an orchestra.

“I wanted to go with him to wander around the wide world, “Yurka said behind me.

I turned around. Yurka grimaced and said again, “I wanted to travel with him and Vaska.”

“There will be no Vaska,” Gleb sighed and began tousling his hair angrily. Yanka squatted by the concrete block and smoothed grass blades on the turf.

Jeremy had died an hour before I got here. He was walking over the rails to the carriage. An electric service locomotive rushed along the track which was closest to our carriage. Jeremy stopped two meters from the rails to let the locomotive go past. All this was right in front of Gleb. Jeremy stood calmly and did not even look at the locomotive. When the locomotive swept past Jeremy, something long and thin was sticking out from it, - either a rail, or a cargo arrow, and its end struck Jeremy in the back, and he flew high into the air. He fell to the ground in separate pieces...

Gleb dragged the debris from the rails and sat for half an hour by them — he was in shock. It was impossible to do anything - Jeremy’s head was smashed in...

When Gleb came to his senses, he rushed to the station master. The station master got scared at first, but then he began to yell that there had never been any electric locomotives at the station. He started phoning somewhere and cursing at someone. But Gleb realized that everything was useless. There was no one to blame and nobody who could give any information about the death of Jeremy.

After all, Jeremy was not human. He had neither documents nor housing in the city. By law, he was nobody at all, not even nothing. He could not even be considered a machine, because every machine was recorded somewhere, had numbers and technical certifications, and belonged to someone. Jeremy had nothing and belonged only to himself.

Jeremy, Jeremy... It seemed that if we were to climb into the Henhouse, he would be sitting there, crouched on his old trunk and drawing his future Vaska.

We climbed into our carriage. Jeremy was no more with us. Only the boy, similar to the Twinkle, laughing in the photograph - he did not know anything about Jeremy’s death. Gleb went to the picture and looked back at us.

Gleb asked awkwardly, “Can I have the photograph of this kid?”

“Sure,” Yurka said, not hiding his wet eyes. Yanka and I nodded. Gleb put the picture in his shabby bag.

I said to him, “You can go to live with us, move into my room. I’ll talk to my mom.”

“We'll see,” Gleb responded then opened Jeremy’s old trunk box.

We came up. In the trunk box, there were various pieces of iron, bundles of wires, yellow plates with the memory blocks from computers, lamps, and tubes – the building blocks for the future Vaska. Gleb sighed and wanted to lower the lid of the box, but Yanka said, “Look, what are this stuff for?”

Shiny lenses lay in a cardboard box. The lenses were of different sizes - from a coin to a saucer.

"They must be for the Vaska’s optical system," Gleb said uncertainly.

Yanka was silent for a moment and then whispered, “I thought ... let's take one each in Jeremy’s memory.”

Each of us chose a lens. I took a very convex, very transparent and very heavy one; it was the size of the bottom of a large glass. I walked away with it and sat at the door of the Henhouse.

I looked through the lens. The concrete block under which we buried Jeremy looked like a small gray dot.

I put the glass on my nail - it became huge, like a pink shovel. The dried scratch on my thumb looked like a ridge. I looked around: what else would enlarge? A black insect the size of a pinhead crawled along the board next to me, but under the glass it turned out to be a horned monster!

It was a good lens. I spun it in the palm of my hand. The sun reflected in the convex glass of the lens like a tiny sparkle. “The Sparky!” suddenly I thought.

I hastily pulled out the ampoule and went with it to the darkest corner of the Henhouse. The fiery point of light shone motionlessly in the ampoule. I felt bad for the living Sparky: there wasn’t for it a cheerful robot-baby Vaska. I stroked the ampoule as if it was a stray kitten. Then I brought my magnifying lens to it.

A fiery spot flashed under the lens. I moved the glass back and forth to adjust the sharpness and finally I saw... It was a luminous disk the size a little larger than a penny, but not even, not smooth. The disk had blurred edges, and flame and light diverged from its center with shaggy curls. It suddenly seemed to me that I was not in the carriage, but was flying somewhere in the black endless emptiness of space...

I had often flipped through my grandfather's atlases and saw on their black sheets pictures of bright spiral galaxies.

A GALAXY

We released the Sparky from the ampoule, and it hovered a meter above the floor. It did not fly away and did not move. We examined it through the lens from all sides - first directly to see its spiral vortex of light and then from the edge, where it looked like a tiny spindle. We breathed quietly and were silent. Finally, Yanka gave the lens to Yurka and whispered, “So it's a Galaxy!”

“Oh, come on...” Yurka answered doubtfully. His words made me sad for our Sparky.

“Why not?” I said.

“It's so tiny, ” Yurka said.

Yanka straightened up and said quietly, but clearly, “Guys! There is no difference between small and large on a cosmic scale. The cosmos is infinite. Isn’t that right, Helka?”

This was the first time he had sought support from me, but not from Yurka. I glanced at Yurka briefly, but victorious.

“Yes,” I said. “How can you compare something with infinity? I mean, that's just ridiculous.”

”Well, of course,” Yurka becoming mad at me immediately. “You think you're the first guy to have this idea? Just like your grandfather professor. I did not compare anything with your infinite stupidity. I said that this Sparky is tiny, but the galaxies, you know how huge they are.”

“We don’t know everything about the Universe,” I objected. “We only know that there are huge galaxies, those that are visible through telescopes, but maybe there are all kinds of galaxies. Maybe there are even more of these tiny ones, like our Sparky, in the world.”

“Well then, it appears that we, like God, have created a whole Galaxy,” Yurka said mockingly. He climbed onto the top shelf of our carriage and was sitting there, swinging his scraped leg.

Gleb took the lens and looked at the Sparky again, “You can hardly say that we have created it. I guess we just discovered it for ourselves, brought it closer to us from Space.”

“How could that be?” I asked.

“Truth is, I don't know yet,” Gleb smiled. “You just have cosmic magic here in Starogorsk.”

“Our Galaxy is not enough for you,” Yurka said gloomily from above. “And you’ve started taking others out from Space.”

“Guys,” Yanka looked around us with his worried eyes. "I was thinking… Maybe this galaxy is really ours."

“How can that be?” I asked again.

Gleb objected, “Hardly. Do you want to say that we have a small model, a sample?”

“We just need it as a sample, a model,” I suddenly remembered the Clown and felt an acute anxiety. “Guys! I want to tell you….”

“Wait,” Yurka grimaced. “Let Yanka explain. What do you mean by saying “ours”?”

"This is not a model," Yanka said. “This is just our Galaxy. The one we live in. It is here and there,” he looked around the carriage, as if he were in Space. "The Sparky is the same."

“The Tech Young magazine also wrote about this,” I remembered. "Some scientists believe that the infinitely large and infinitely small are the same thing and that they merge somewhere in infinity."

“In infinity, after all, but not in our Henhouse,” Yurka said.

“Yurka,” Gleb said. “Well, if we want to believe that our Galaxy is in our hands, so what's the problem?”

Yurka jumped down and found himself directly in the rays of the evening sun, shining through the open sliding doors of the train carriage from behind the distant poplar trees….

When I thought about Yurka, I most often remembered him exactly as he was then in the orange rays of the setting sun. He was really tense, as if each of his veins rang like the strings under Yanka’s bow. He was in the uniform of a drummer, only without his beret, of course, and without his cape. His chevrons and aiguillettes shone. Yurka’s eyes shone too, reflecting the orange sun.

“If this is true,” Yurka said in an unfamiliar taut voice, “then the whole Universe is based on blood!”

It seemed to me for a second that the rays of the sun had turned completely red. All of a sudden I felt really uncomfortable.

“Isn't that right?” Gleb asked quietly. “How many wars, revolts and catastrophes have there been.”

“No,” Yanka responded. "They were only on Earth, but not in the entire Galaxy."

"What do we know about the Galaxy?" Gleb grinned.

“But the scadermen did not find a single living planet. There are people only on Earth,” I said.

"Scadermen, "Yurka grumbled. “Don't talk to me about scadermen. Now I know more about scadermen than you guys know about them. What did they manage to discover? Several planets unsuitable for people. But in the Galaxy there are maybe millions of planets with people.”

I looked to where our Sparky was glowing in the dark corner. Are there really millions of planets with people and maybe we ourselves are inside it?

Yanka said peacefully, “But what's wrong with our blood? This is not the blood that comes from war, but ours, a living one.”

“Well, then, the whole Galaxy is…. alive,” Yurka said meaningfully.

“So what?” I said.

"So what? Then we must take care and protect it with all our might!" Yurka exclaimed.

Gleb said there was no need to carry the Sparky in my pocket while I was walking down the street. I decided that Gleb should keep the Sparky for a while.

Gleb decided to stay in the carriage until morning.

When I made my way along the evening street to my house, I thought of the Clown. Maybe I had made a mistake not telling about the Clown to Gleb and the guys. I even shook my head with annoyance. But I just could not tell them.

Well, frankly, I was even glad that Yurka had interrupted me. I did not dare to tell them, because I did not really know anything for sure. Maybe, after all, it was someone's stupid prank, and the guys might think that I was a coward. I was scared of some bumblebee. In fact, I was really close to giving the Sparky to the Clown. It was a good thing, that the drummers helped me escape.

However, on my way home, I desperately blamed myself for that. I couldn't just scream out there in the carriage, “Listen to me! I want to tell to you about what happened to me, something kind of big!”

So many mysteries were coming at me all at once! How did these Sparky hunters know about it? Why did they need our tiny galaxy? (or maybe it was not tiny?) Who were they? Bullies? Space pirates? Why couldn’t they create their own Sparky?

The Clown let slip “We have the wrong chemistry.” What chemistry? Blood chemistry?

But maybe they had no blood at all? I remembered how the Clown’s mask moved. The statues in the park! What if they consisted of some crystals and were solid, like statues...

Yurka and I tripped and fell in the same place, near the gypsum statue of the rower...

“Jeremy, why did you break the sculptures?”

“I thought they were spies…”

I searched through my pockets: where is Jeremy's letter? I had completely forgotten about it! The letter was in my pocket.

“Beware of them, they are not human. Come into the carriage. I'll tell you, I’ve found out everything. Jeremy".

He did not have time to tell us. Where did that ill-fated electric locomotive come from? But what if I could be hit by a crazy car running round the corner too?

The sun went down with a very warm twilight. I was never afraid of anything on our street that smelled of wild dill and "grandmother's beads" grass. The windows shone so well. But I felt fear. My back even became wet.

I looked around and ran. My mind reeled with thoughts, “It's a shame, Travushkin! What are you afraid of, who needs you? Nobody knows that you guessed about the statues. You don’t have the living Sparky with you any more. Gleb has it ... But Gleb doesn’t know anything! What if they attack him?"

I was already at home. I jumped onto the porch and swung open the door.

“He's here,” my mom sighed. “I was about to send someone out to look for you. You are so scruffy-looking. Go on, get washed. I'm serving dinner.”

But I was on edge.

”Mom! Can I go to spend the night at Yurka’s place? Well, mom…. I’m going to eat there.”

Mom said sadly, “Not true, Helik. You are not going to Yurka, but to your Henhouse.”

I, apparently, blushed like Yurka’s drum. I whispered, “How did you know... about the Henhouse?”

“I know your Gleb too. He is very nice person, but his story is strange.”

“Ah… But who told you?”

“Gleb, he told me himself. He came that evening when I arrived. He was worried that they would scold you about the typewriter. He explained everything to me.”

“Really need to go, Mom! It's the last time, I promise.”

“But why the last time?”

“The station master is evicting Gleb from the station. Mom, can he stay with us for a while?”

“I'll think about it,” my mom said.

So I ran to the station.

THE THEORY OF PARALLEL SPACES

When I ran to the train carriage, I saw that light was pouring through the cracks in its boards, so Gleb was there. Gleb, Yurka and Yanka were there in the carriage.

Yanka said to me, “We were about ready to come to your home. We were not sure whether they would let you go or not."

“Here I am! My mom is letting me spend the night.”

“We wanted you to grab your grandfather’s Atlas of the Universe to find our Sparkle-Galaxy there,” Yurka explained.

I sat on Jeremy’s trunk and said, “That makes no sense for two reasons. Even for

three. In the first place my grandmother does not let anyone take this atlas out of the house. Secondly, not all galaxies and nebulas are printed in atlases. There are billions of them. Thirdly, a picture of our galaxy cannot be in the atlas. Who could take its picture from outside? People do not go beyond the limits of our galaxy and cannot take its picture.”

“Escader-three did it,” Yurka quickly said. He squinted, displeased.

“Three? Ha! Who will prove it? They themselves did not know what had happened to them! Maybe they had gone out of our galaxy, or maybe it just seemed that way to them. The subspace tricks. This is explained in the third grade at school,” I said.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“But at school they don’t tell us that they took a picture,” Yurka objected.

“Because this is a scientifically unproven picture and it cannot be printed in atlases,” I said.

Yurka said, “If they don’t believe the scadermen, why would they send them into space?”

Yanka said quietly, “It is said that escaders were forbidden to build.”

Yurka said with displeasure, “Nobody forbade it. It's just very expensive. Anyway, they are building new escaders little by little. They have recently begun to work on number Nine.”

"Guys!" Gleb claimed. “Why don't you explain it to me? Scaders, scadermen - that's what I'm hearing. What do these words mean?”

“You don't know that either?” Yanka was amazed.

“Is your Kolych in the middle of nowhere, or what?” Yurka said.

Gleb frowned, and I felt sorry for him.

"Gleb, a scader is a type of a starship. A long-range reconnaissance supercruiser. They are not being built much because the debate is about whether they are needed or not. Many scientists say that they are not needed. It is more expensive to build a scader than several cities. But that is not the point. There’s another theory. My friend, a student of my grandfather, told me that you can tear space without leaving your planet," I said.

“An instant tear in space is probably even more expensive than a scader," Yanka said thoughtfully.

“But faster,” I protested. “There and back - as if going to the next street. You don’t have to wait all those years for the space cruiser to return.”

"Ah, that’s more gossip," Yurka responded. "This is the old Theory of Parallel Spaces."

I immediately remembered the well in Yarkson and my dad.

"Parallel spaces. I think this is when there can be several different worlds on the same planet and they never intersect," I said to Yurka.

"Let's go to bed, guys! I am supposed to be out the carriage at dawn," Gleb said.

We put out the lantern and lay on the tight air mattresses. It became quiet, only the cicadas were chirping.

"If there is this theory of parallel spaces, then it is clear," Gleb said slowly. "I’ve already thought of that. The railway line goes through the Starogorsk station. Another line also goes through Kolych. These two lines run in parallel to one another and know nothing about each other. Starogorsk and Kolych also exist in parallel and do not know anything about each other. Somewhere there is a railway switch, a connection of the rail lines. My train slipped this switch somewhere in space and brought me here. It's simple.”

"Parallel spaces never intersect. Nor do parallel lines. They teach this in first grade," I said.

"Two parallel lines could intersect at a unique point that lies at infinity," Gleb retorted.

"Every schoolboy knows that," Yurka said.

“At infinity! But your train trip lasted only two hours,” I said.

Yanka laughed, “This time, two hours was enough for Infinity. So you want to look for the railway switch?”

“Yes. I just don’t know which train to go there on,” Gleb grinned.

Yanka stood up, "Why do we need a train? We are already on wheels."

He ran his fingers into the pocket of Gleb's plaid shirt and pulled out the ampoule with the magic Sparky. Then Yanka quickly went to the end of the carriage, squatted and looked back at us.

“The axle of our carriage is under the floor, right about here, right?” Yanka asked.

We ran up to Yanka. He carefully put the ampoule into a small hole in the planks of the floor of our wagon, but nothing happened. Nothing at first.

I heard a buzz like in an overheated energy collector and then our “Henhouse” started trembling, and there was a rattle under the floor (the rusted wheels were fused to the rails). The carriage jerked so that I flew down and Yurka fell on me.

We jumped up. The floor of the carriage was shaking. The lantern swayed on the nail and the shadows danced.

"We're off!" Yanka shouted.

Gleb stood wide-legged.

"Yes!” Gleb exclaimed. "It might be a way out for all of us."

WE ARE GOING TO INFINITY

"It might be a way out,” Gleb shouted as his thick glasses shone.

“I’m not so sure about it,” I said, my teeth clattering with the jolting. “It seems to me, we are near to being off the rails.”

The rails were old, on rotten timber sleepers. Our carriage was bouncing on the frequent joints in the rails.

“We are about to go on the main line,” Yurka said.

Suddenly something snapped strongly under the wheels of our carriage and the shaking immediately ended. The rails started humming calmly - our carriage made the switch and the main line ran on mighty concrete sleepers. The speed increased immediately. The wind kicked in the front door, and mussed up Yanka’s hair.

Yanka laughed. However, it wasn’t very funny for me.

“How do we get back?” I asked.

Yanka replied without stopping laughing, “Don't worry about that. We will put the Sparky to the back axle, and the carriage will back up."

“So where are we heading?” I asked.

“Where? We are going to infinity!”

I said in annoyance, “What if we collide head-on with an oncoming train? Then there will be Infinity and Eternity for sure!”

Yanka retorted, “The oncoming train will go along the left track; this is the doubletrack railway.”

“There are no trains at this time,” said Yurka. I looked at Gleb questioningly.

“Guys, Helka is right. We need some kind of signal. Let's hang out the lantern,” Gleb said. He took the Saturn lantern and went to the front platform of the carriage. Yanka and Yurka followed him.

Soon Gleb returned and went into the corner of the carriage, where Jeremy’s jacket was swinging on a nail. Gleb took the jacket off and put it around my shoulders. Jeremy’s leather jacket was big and heavy — it fell to my knees. The jacket smelled of Jeremy — of warm metal, grease, and plastic insulation. I quietly stroked the jacket lapel. Poor Jeremy. Had we been reassured too soon after his death?

And no one knew that he died, most likely, not by accident! I didn’t tell anyone about Jeremy’s note.

“Gleb…”

“What is it, Helka?”

“No, no - it's nothing.”

It was too late to tell Gleb about it. He could be scared for us and refuse to look for the way back to his Kolych.

Gleb stepped away from me. He probably thought, "Helka is sad about Jeremy, but it's better to be sad alone."

I sat with my legs dangling in the opening of the side door. A warm wind hit my legs and climbed under the jacket. There was a strong smell of wormwood. The sunset was growing crimson on the side where we were going, and the sky turned completely black above our heads, on the northern horizon. The stars were big and white. Lights of windows in a village shone not far from the rails. And the weird thing was, the lights and the lanterns seemed to freeze, the stars floating overhead as if the sky were spinning smoothly.

“What a mess?” I thought. “Ah, I get it! Perhaps our carriage is making a tricky U- turn.”

Yurka came up to me, and I stopped thinking about the stars.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"There's nowhere to sit on the platform," Yurka said.

I moved. Yurka was silent.

"By the way, where is Yanka?" I thought. Yanka stood on the front platform of the carriage with Gleb as if they were on a balcony. They were talking intensely about something.

The stars continued to fly back, and the sunset became brighter for some reason, as if we were catching it sitting in our “passenger rocket.”

“How long have we been on the road?” I looked at my wristwatch. “I'm afraid my watch isn't working again. Our carriage started its journey at exactly ten, but now it is just two minutes past ten….”

I was about to jump up, but Yurka stopped me, “Wait. I want to tell you something.”

Yurka fingered the aiguillette on his chest for a while then began speaking, “At the end of May, I went to Neisk to be with my mother. At one point she was sorting through old papers and postcards and wasn’t looking at me. Then suddenly a photograph fell from the table — it was an old photograph, not even a coloured one. I picked it up, but my mother got scared for some reason and said, "Give it to me!" There was a courtyard, a skinny girl and three boys in the picture. Two of the boys had wooden sabers, like when we used to play musketeers, but the other boy in the picture had a homemade drum. I asked my mother, “Who is that in the picture?” She smiled and told me, as if she had decided to confess to something, "The girl is me. The boys were from our neighborhood. I don’t remember their names." It seemed strange to me that she did not remember this. Two boys were standing next to her, and the boy with the drum was a little to the side. He was looking back as if he wanted to hail them. My mother asked me to give her the picture, and when I handed her it, I saw myself in the mirror. You know, Helka, there weren’t any similarities between me and the drummer in the picture, but there was something about the angle of his head….

I asked my mother immediately, "So, have you known him since childhood?" "Who?!"

"My father. Where is he?"

“Heavens, how should I know where he is?! No one on Earth can say where he is and what’s being done to him!"

"Why?”

"Leave me alone! I forbid you to speak about this once and for all."

“He is my father!”

"He didn’t even know that you exist!” My mother broke down in tears and our conversation ended."

Yurka stopped talking and started fingering his aiguillette again.

“What happened next?” I asked.

"Well, when they called me to the drummers in the park, I thought: If I could be a drummer, then I'm like my dad. The thread that binds he and I together."

"I found that drumstick that you’d lost," I said.

I decided that the time had come to talk about Jeremy's letter.

"Helka! Yurka!" Gleb shouted out as he was waving to us standing at the carriage end door. "Come here quick!"

We went out to the front platform. Here the wind was stronger and hit me right in the face and threw open Jeremy's jacket which I was wearing. The rails glittered in the light of the lantern and raced under the carriage. The sunset was pink and yellow.

“The left track is gone!” Yanka said loudly. “We are racing on the one-track line!”

“Look, on the right there!” Gleb shouted. “Honestly! I saw the lights and the gas flame of the factory in Kolych!”

A chain of yellow squares flashed and ran towards us on the right through the black bushes flying by. It was a train! It was racing a hundred meters from us.

“So there is also a railway line!” Yurka said.

“Of course,” Gleb responded joyfully.

I asked, “So what? Are we going to infinity? ”

Gleb laughed, "I do not know."

I said, “My wristwatch has stopped. What time is it?"

Gleb and Yanka looked at the faces of their watches.

“Three minutes past ten.”

“What's the matter with you two guys? Have we been in this train carriage for only three minutes?” I said. “No, this can't be!”

Yanka responded carelessly, “In infinity anything can happen.”

The sunset shone ahead, and a sharp darkness hung over it, as if black clouds crushed dawning of the evening. But these were not clouds, because stars still shone in the dark. They were still moving, but quieter. The railway line on our right was getting closer - flashlights flickered along it. Finally, we saw that the rails on this line ran very close — they were about to cross and merge with our rails.

"The railroad switch!" Yanka shouted. He ran inside the carriage like a shot and immediately returned. He held in his palm the ampoule with the magic Sparky.

AT THE SWITCH POINT

The train carriage slowed down. The right rail track, running from the unknown world, where Kolych city was, smoothly converged with our railroad line. The signal post with the switch point lamp and the lever flickered in the twilight. Something snapped under the wheels. Our carriage went on for another twenty meters and stopped, as if it had run into an elastic pillow.

We jumped out of the carriage onto the grass.

After the noise of travelling along the railway, it seemed to us that everything was quiet - only our breathing and whispering could be heard. It was very warm, and still smelled of wormwood.

Yanka said in a low voice, “Let's go to the railroad switch."

We went around the carriage and walked along the railroad ties to the lamp on the low wooden post. The lamp burned with a dim yellow light. It was a tin box with a round hole in which ribbed glass glowed - like the headlights of an old car. It seemed that behind the glass was not a lamp, but a candle. Or maybe it was.

“The old railroad switch lever,” Gleb chuckled. "The manual lever to connect the worlds on Universal frontiers. How could I miss this mechanism last time?"

A meter high handle with a counterweight was sticking out from under the lamp. Yanka stood astride, grabbed hold of the lever and looked back at us. The sunset illuminated his face, and the bright spots in his eyes shone like a sparkler.

“Let’s throw the switch!” he said. "Then Gleb can get to Kolych. Right, guys?" “Wait,” Gleb said. He pushed Yanka gently away from the lever. Gleb stood for a while and went to the carriage. We followed him. Gleb disappeared into the Henhouse, but immediately came out with his bag on his shoulder. For some reason, he turned off the lantern hanging on the carriage. The sunset became even brighter. The rails seemed to start shining. They were very straight and ran far off into the distance. We had arrived at Infinity, where parallel lines from Starogorsk and Kolych were connected, and from here the track went on. Maybe these two steel lines would merge later into a single thin twinkling monorail passing through the entire Galaxy I looked along the rails running away to the horizon. But where did they lead us? Who laid them?

Gleb said, “You know what, guys? Let's not touch the switch lever. I mean, if we really think about it, what would I do in Kolych? Probably no one is waiting for me there anymore. I'd better go ahead.”

We were silent. The grasshoppers were chirping. Infinity smelled like wormwood and enveloped us.

Yanka said to Gleb, “I thought you really wanted to go home, to Kolych.”

"I wanted to do my job and I still want to… But I’m looking at this road… Does anyone know what's ahead? I can’t go back when there is such a road ahead. I'd never forgive myself if... Maybe this is my job - to find out where it leads.

Everything is fine, guys. One thing is bad: I have to say goodbye to you."

We put our hands in his huge hand. He squeezed them all at once, then let them go abruptly and immediately started to walk away. Gleb was walking tall and quickly

– two cross ties at a time. He was tall, large-handed and round-shouldered and therefore easily strutted quickly along the rail.

"Gleb, wait!" Yurka shouted.

Gleb stopped twenty steps from us and looked around.

“Gleb, I'll go with you, “Yurka quickly went to Gleb. Yanka and I, without understanding anything, hurried after them.

“What are you doing? It'll mean trouble at home. They'll be looking all over for you,” I said to Yurka.

“No, they won’t. My aunt will think that I left for Neisk. Maybe I can find him, " Yurka said.

“Who?” I asked.

“My father. He’s surely travelling with his crew in the subspace. Where can they be found, if not in Infinity?” Yurka said.

Yanka was silent.

I said to Yurka angrily, “And how do you know he was a scadermen?”

“My mother told me ’No one on Earth can say where he is and what’s being done to him!’ But if he is not on Earth, then where?" Yurka said and stepped towards me, “Helka… Hope you're not mad at me. I have to go.”

“Damn you, “I shouted in a fit of anger. “Just turn around, and walk away. Anyway, in two weeks I’ll leave for Yarkson to my father.”

Yurka was silent. He found my palm under the jacket and shook it. Then he turned to Yanka, "Yanka, goodbye... Don’t forget, what we were talking about, okay?"

"Yurka," Gleb said hesitantly. "I’m not sure about you. I probably have no right to take you with me."Yurka laughed, "I will go on my own, but next to you. Well, let's go!"

I sat on a warm rail and watched them walking away. Their figures began to shrink and soon they merged into a single spot. Maybe parallel rails also merged into one line there. It was just the two of us, Yanka and me, on the edge of the Universe, in Infinity, where the chirping of night grasshoppers was getting louder.

image [https://avatars.dzeninfra.ru/get-zen_doc/3655132/pub_5ef780bb72d70b3bfb1ffb6d_5ef8b5cde7cbcc2ed4f5238a/scale_1200]

TWO ON THE RAILS

Yanka sat next to me. Yurka and Gleb were out of sight. A half-moon hung with its horns up in the dark skies. I did not want to get up, nor did I want to do anything. But I didn’t want to sit on the rails all night. What if the night in this Infinity was endless?

"Let's go?" I asked Yanka.

“Er, come on,” he said, then stood up. So did I. I went to the carriage, and the heads of grass rustled with my jacket. The Henhouse was rising on the rails like a dark monster. I jumped on the platform of the carriage and tried to turn on the lantern, but Saturn did not light up, no matter how much I pressed the button. I shook it - no result.

“It’s not going to light until we charge it in the sun,” Yanka said from below and suddenly added, "Well, you should have given the Sparky to them.”

"To who?" I asked and looked at Yanka frightened. It made me think of the evil Clown and I got scared.

"To Gleb and Yurka. They need the Sparky and its magic energy since no-one knows what is ahead," Yanka said.

“The energy and a danger,” I thought.

“Now we are late too to talk about it, Yanka. We’ll never catch up with Gleb and Yurka,” I said.

“We don’t have to catch up with them. We’ll make a paper dove, put the Sparky on it and fly it off - it will fly itself to them.”

“Yes, but how about us? How do we get home without our guiding Sparky?" I asked.

“On foot. See, we are not far from home,” Yanka answered.

On the side from where we arrived, behind the carriage, the lights of Starogorsk burned: the rows of windows in the high-rise tower block, the monastery towers illuminated by searchlights, the red lamps of the television tower.

“On foot we'll be there in less than an hour,” Yanka sighed. “This infinity was not so long.”

“Yes,” I agreed. I did not want to go into the dark train carriage.

"So let’s send them the Sparky?" Yanka asked.

I was silent.

“You will miss the Sparky or what?” Yanka asked quietly.

“No. You just don't know…” I was confused.

"What?" Yanks asked.

"Okay, sit down," I said.

We sat on the warm rails - against each other and I finally talked about everything. I guess I explained it very inconsistently, but Yanka understood everything and was not surprised.

"I think I've heard about such things," Yanka said.

"Yes? Yanka, where?"

"My grandfather told me something similar."

"Yanka, it’s dangerous to send them the Sparky. The clown and his friends will begin to hunt for Yurka and Gleb, but they don’t even know anything."

"We can explain to them. Let's write it right on the dove... They will save the Sparky better than us. They are stronger than us, and they have more courage."

That was true.

"Okay, come on!" I stood up. "Do you have paper to make a dove?"

“Oh, no. I don’t have,” Yanka said.

I threw Jeremy's jacket over Yanka, and started fumbling for any paper in the pockets on my shorts and on my shirt.

"There's a bunch of sheets in the jacket," Yanka said.

"These are Gleb’s notes. Here, I’ve found one. Look, this is Jeremy’s letter!" I exclaimed.

Yanka turned on his flashlight and read the letter. He said, “Good enough. Let's send them the letter, but I’ll write some more."

Yanka had an automatic pencil in his pocket. He laid out Jeremy’s letter on the hard tie. I shone the light for him, and he wrote:

“We send you the Sparky. You need it. Just protect it from enemies. Do not trust masked clowns and beware of gypsum spies, they are hunting for our Sparky. Here is Jeremy’s letter. He wanted to tell something, but did not have time.

Yanka and Helka."

We folded the letter into the paper dove, then released the living Sparky from the ampoule and put it on the paper beak. The tiny galaxy was shining brightly, as if saying goodbye to us.

“Let it go,” I said.

Yanka stood up and gently flew the dove off - in the direction where the sky still brightened over the horizon and the moon shone. The dove flew easily and smoothly. The Sparky flickered for us for the last time and dissolved in the dark air together with the paper dove.

“I’m sure, it reaches them,” Yanka said.

I nodded and asked, “Let's go home?”

“Yes…”

“Yanka! What if some train crashes into our carriage?”

We quickly looked around.

There was no train carriage anymore. Our Henhouse disappeared.

Where it had just stood like a black uneven cube, there was nothing. There were only rails and tall grass.

I was not surprised. You never know what could be on the border of different spaces. I knew it was all over. It made me sad. Our evenings in the Henhouse, adventures, magic, my friendship with Yurka, Gleb’s secret, dangers - it all ended.

“Let's go,” I whispered.

And we went to the nearby lights of Starogorsk.

Walking on the ties was uncomfortable. I stood on the rail and walked on it like a tightrope. The main thing was not to think about balance all the time.

Yanka was walking on the other rail.

The stars above and the moon behind us were very bright, so we could actually see the track and each other. I looked at Yanka. He was wearing Jeremy’s jacket and looked like a circus tightrope walker. I smiled.

Yanka said, “Let’s hold hands; it will be much easier to walk.”

“Come on,” I agreed.

In fact, it did become easier to walk and I stopped moving from side to side. Yanka's fingers were warm and very thin, but strong.

So we walked for about fifteen minutes. I did not look at my wristwatch - it could be wrong. The heavy jacket kept coming off Yanka's shoulder and he was pulling it up all the time.

“Is the jacket bothering you? Let me carry it,” I asked Yanka.

“It's okay. You know, all the pockets are stuffed with papers,” Yanka said.

“I've told you before, Gleb left them for me,” I said.

“Maybe you’ll let me take a look at them? Let’s do it right now! Did Gleb write poetry?” Yanka asked.

We suddenly stopped. I used Yanka’s flashlight.

“Take them out,” I said.

Yanka retrieved the crumpled sheets of rolled up papers from the jacket pocket. The papers were covered with crosses and marks.

“These are some old papers. Look in another pocket,” I said.

But Yanka moved my hand with the flashlight to the sheets of paper and said, “Look. These are Jeremy’s drawings. This is Vaska!”

I saw some lines, squares, and among them - the drawing of a thin-legged robot child. On other pages I saw his smiling square head with a nose that looked like a teapot spout. There were his hands, torso...

“Helka!” Yanka exclaimed. “Since we have the drawings, we can create Vaska ourselves!”

“We do not know how.”

“We will learn! The main thing is that we have drawings!”

“But what about the living Sparky? We don’t have it anymore.”

“Can't we make another one?”

“That's true,” I thought. “We know the recipe!”

But it’d mean looking over my shoulder again and being afraid of any sorts of clowns and other enemies.

I confessed to Yanka, “It’s scary.”

“Because of the Clown?”

“Because of my finger. You know how I’m afraid of piercing my finger with a needle. And now I have to do it again.”

“Me too.”

“But Vaska will come into the world, as Jeremy wanted.”

We put Jeremy's drawings back into the pocket of his jacket and then carried on walking on the rails. Each of us was taking his own rail trail. I thought that somewhere far away from us, Yurka and Gleb were walking too. They probably were holding our paper dove with the Sparky in their palms and remembering us.

“Helka!” Yanka suddenly said with worry in his voice. “But there are only two of us!”

“So what?”

“But we need at least three drops of blood. Who else would give it to us?”

The bright red shirt and the cheerful face of Twinkle boy immediately flashed into my memory.

“I have someone in mind,” I said.

“It must be a trustworthy person,” Yanka said.

“He’s trustworthy. It’s the boy who brought me the letter from Jeremy.”

“Okay then,” Yanka said and smiled. But he immediately added sadly, “You're leaving for Yarkson soon.”

I thought for a while and said, "No, Yanka, I will not leave."

Yanka started talking quickly and joyfully, “Of course! We have so much to do and learn! And we must go to the junkyard on a full moon to find out if there really are rusty witches or not. ”

“I don't think Jeremy was lying,” I said.

I felt a playful breeze. The grass rustled and the grasshoppers fell silent. I felt chilly. I jerked my shoulder and touched Yanka's shoulder. I was surprised to find that we were walking so close to each other. We touched each other’s elbows.

“Yanka, are you walking on the rail?”

“Yes, on the rail.”

Yanka’s rail and mine got closer together. Perhaps infinity was looking for another point in space where parallel lines could converge.

A fresh predawn wind blew again. Yanka opened the jacket; it was as wide as a cloak. Yanka put the jacket on both of us. It was not difficult, since we were walking very close - shoulder to shoulder.

THE END of the second book of the trilogy "The Dovecote on the Yellow Glade."

A continuation of the story is in the third and final book "The Boy and the Lizard", where you will meet book characters from the first and second books and several new characters.

image [https://www.rusf.ru/vk/pict/sterligo/golubjatnja_na_jeltoi_poljane_15b.gif]

Translated into English - Invir Lazarev, 2024