"We'll be there at dusk."
"Oh... Can't you try and get there earlier? I've got to be in time
for the museum. It'll most likely be shut in the evening."
The Pilot shook his head.
"There's no point trying."
"Why?"
"Why, don't you understand? You're in a fairy-tale and fairy-tales
have lots of different rules. Planes always land at Vetrogorsk after
sunset."
"But what if you're in a supersonic jet?"
"Makes no difference whether you're in a supersonic jet, or on a
flying carpet, a balloon or even a rocket... The Pilot won't spot the
town unless the sun has set."
Alex was silent for a while, and then plucked up courage and asked
the question playing on his mind. "I say... Are you really a pilot? A
real pilot? Only please don't feel offended."
"I'm not offended in the least," replied the Pilot gravely. "I would
have been if you'd asked that before we took off. But you weren't afraid
to fly with me."
"No, and I'm not afraid now either. I'm just curious. Is this a job
you do - just like a grown-up pilot?"
"Yes, almost... Well, no, not quite. My flights are different. You
see, I'm a Pilot for Special Missions."
"But that's even more important than being an ordinary pilot, isn't
it? After all, Special Missions are really hard, aren't they?"
"Not always. They're just special."
"But why were you picked for this work? I mean... you're not even
grown-up yet. After all, it's usually grown-ups who are sent on important
missions."
"Grown-ups are no good for this job," sighed the Pilot." You
sometimes have to fly into fairy-tales and grown-ups can't make head or
tail of them and always muddle something up."
"But surely some grown-ups understand fairy-tales well?"
"Yes, of course, they do but then they can't fly planes."
"You mean, there isn't anyone who can both fly and understand
fairy-tails?"
"I don't know... I heard of one but he lived a long time ago. A test
pilot who was killed fighting fascists. He crashed into the sea..."
The Pilot fell silent, and so did Alex for he thought that the Pilot
was most likely feeling sad and did not dare ask him any more questions.
A bristly bluish forest stretched out below.
"Look," said the Pilot. "That's Enchanted Forest Number Eleven. It's
got everything! For one thing at least a dozen Red Riding Hoods. You
can't imagine what horrid little girls they are! They reckon that because
a fairy-tale was written about them, they can behave just like film
stars! They're forever arguing and shrieking at one another and almost
coming to blows over the pettiest of things."
"How incredible!..." Alex said in a whisper. "And who else lives
there?"
"You see that road? Well, every day at twelve o'clock sharp the
Gingerbread Man runs along it. As regular as clockwork... Well, and then
he meets the Cat and then the Dog and then the Cow..."
"You mean, the Fox gobbles him up every day?" sadly asked Alex.
"Not likely! Gingerbread men are sharper these days and don't let
themselves get eaten up... There're also two goblins, a cave of gnomes
and eight talking owls. Two of them can even read and write..."
All of a sudden something glinted in the sunlight on the road below.
"And there goes the Silver Knight!" exclaimed the Pilot joyfully.
"Look!"
Alex looked closer and, sure enough, a knight in a pointed helmet and
silver armour was trotting along the road on a stallion with a streaming
mane. He looked as tiny as a toy horseman. A brightly-coloured little
pennant was fluttering at the end of his spear, which seemed no bigger
than a straw and his white shield was casting off sun's rays like a tiny
mirror.
"His horse went lame one day," said the Pilot. "And I had to fly him
to the Blue Kingdom. The knight, I mean, not his horse. Gosh, he was huge
and had such a lot of armour! It's a good thing my plane's unbreakable or
else we would definitely have crashed."
"Is it really unbreakable?" asked Alex cautiously.
"Of course! You can do anything you like in it! Would you like me to
show you?"
"Oh yes!" said Alex warily.
And the next moment the plane plummeted downwards. The earth and sky
began twirling round at a terrifying speed and Alex's heart sank
violently.
"Well, this is where my fairy-tale ends," he thought and closing his
eyes tight, grit his teeth so as not to scream.
And then all of a sudden they were flying normally again. Alex opened
his eyes and saw they were flying very, very low over a yellow road. Then
the Knight flashed by and Alex caught sight of him waving his hand in a
chain-mail gauntlet.
The plane began to climb again. Alex's heart was pounding like a drum
in a symphony orchestra.
"Phew," he said.
The Pilot looked brightly at him and said, "You were terrific! I
thought you'd be scared stiff but you didn't even yell... The Knight
screamed 'crikey' twice! He's so heavy, we had to descend quickly, and he
started shrieking... But when I asked him how he was going to fight the
Dragon when he was even afraid of a plane, he said, 'Oh, the dragon's
quite different. I'm used to him but you won't get me back in a plane for
love or money'."
"You mean, he really did fight the Dragon?" asked Alex, his voice
still unsteady.
"They've been fighting once a week for a long time now. The Dragon's
really old and has only five of his nine heads left. And his eyes on one
of them are made of car headlights. He keeps asking to be pensioned off
but without success. He's been told he can go to a zoo whenever he likes
and there's a cage with all mod cons ready for him. But he can't have a
pension because he's not a person, you see... But, you know, the witch
Baba-Yaga wangled a pension because she's disabled, you see. She's got a
gammy leg."
"Have you seen her too?" asked Alex with admiration.
"I flew her to town once when she went to arrange to have her hovel
fixed up... What a horrible old hag she is. Kept grumbling that I wasn't
flying the plain right, and so I said to her, 'This is a plane, you know,
grannie, not a broom.' And do you know what she said, 'If I'd got hold of
you when my teeth were in good shape I'd have made quick work of you...'
How do you like that? And then she went and wrote a letter of complaint
to the Controller, saying she'd been spoken to disrespectfully."
"But why's the Controller mad at you? Has it something to do with a
fairy-tale?"
"No. If it had, he wouldn't have bothered... In a village near the
airfield there were some children who kept a puppy in their yard. One day
some people driving by in a lorry spotted the puppy in the street,
grabbed it and slung it in the back of the lorry. They wanted to keep it
for themselves. Well, the children began yelling and chasing after it but
how could they possibly catch a lorry? Well, it just so happened that I
was flying past..."
"Did you catch them up?"
"Why, of course. I swooped down on them from behind, hovered over the
back of the lorry, crawled out onto the wing, grabbed the puppy by the
scruff of its neck and popped it inside the cabin. But the driver got the
fright of his life and drove into a ditch... The Controller didn't want
to let me fly after that." The Pilot suddenly smiled rather sadly. "But
he had to in the end. Seeing there's nobody else..."
"Tell me... began Alex hesitantly, "how did you become the Pilot for
Special Missions? Or is it a secret?"
"No, not at all. I can tell you if you're interested."
"Of course I am!"
"Only... There's still time. Let's call in at the Antarctica first."
Alex decided not to let anything surprise him any more and merely
commented, "It's probably very cold there."
"Not a bit."
They flew on for a short while and then all of a sudden the plane
began to descend over a vast green wasteland on the edge of a town. It
landed in a patch of weeds.
The Pilot flung the door open and jumped down into the undergrowth.
Alex followed suit. His feet had gone rather numb and he began stamping
them to get his blood flowing again and asked in a matter-of-fact manner,
"Were you forced to land?"
"No, we've arrived," said the Pilot quietly.
Alex did not understand what he meant. Then he gazed round, blinked
and asked hesitantly, "This isn't Antarctica, is it?"
There were burdocks, hemp and wormwood growing all around, and there
was a bitter smell of wormwood summer air. The outline of a small town
could be seen in the greyish-blue mist on the horizon.
It was very quiet. In fact, the silence was so profound that not even
the constant chirring of industrious grasshoppers could disturb it. The
silence was coming from everywhere and seemed all-absorbing.
The remains of a plank fence and two posts with a sagging gate
between them were sticking out of the undergrowth near the plane.
The Pilot went up to a post, leaned towards it and whispered, "Can
you hear how quiet it is?"
Alex felt rather scared.
"It's like being on another planet," he said.
"Or in Antarctica before it was discovered."
"But... all the same this isn't Antarctica," said Alex warily.
Instead of the replying, the Pilot gazed into the distance and asked,
"See that town?"
"Yes."
"That's Kolokoltsev. We used to live there..."
"Who's 'we'?"
"Come over here."
Alex walked over and the Pilot moved away from the post and four
names, which had been carved with a penknife, became visible on the old
wood:
ANTON
ARKADY
TIMA
CARROTY.
"Anton - that's me," said the Pilot. "And the others were my
friends."
"Were?" asked Alex. "What about now?"
The Pilot raised his serious eyes towards Alex and said, "I'll tell
you if you like."
With a feeling of alarm, Alex hurriedly nodded.
Chapter Nine
"We used to play here," said the Pilot. "You can hear how quiet it
is. It's just like being on some remote island... This is our country.
Just look: if you join the first letters of our names together, you get
"Ant... Ar... T... Ca...". Of course, it's not real Antarctica. We
probably wouldn't even get there on my Dragonfly. But we didn't want to.
We were happy here..."
Yes, they were very happy whenever the four of them got together:
There was wide-eyed little Anton who usually spoke in a whisper and was
best at inventing games; and stocky business-like Arkady who had worked
out a way of catching summer stars in the sky: you smeared the top of a
balloon with soft toffee and then released it into the sky on a long
length of string. As soon as a star got stuck to it, you could pull it
down (mind you, the star sometimes scorched the balloon and burst it but
that didn't happen often). Then there was skinny fair-haired Tima who was
good at training grasshoppers, and freckled ginder-haired Danilka
(nicknamed Carroty) who was a loyal friend and a witty artist. It was he
who had drawn on the fence the mischievous bobtails and cunning beast
Crocopudra which had then escaped from the planks and started living in
the undergrowth.
It was wonderful on this vast wasteland although there was nothing
but weeds all around and an old fence...
You only had to will it and the wasteland turned into an unexplored
land. In the heart of the forests bobtails, part-hare and part-gnome,
frolicked and made merry while Crocopudra, which had a great sense of
humour despite its voracious appetite, set traps and organised adventures.
And you could discover entire underground towns in the labyrinthine caves
whose stone icicles emitted a strange light. And in Green Creek the Blue
Whale ice-breaker was always standing ready to sail in any direction.
And this was all completely real and not make-believe.
You see, somewhere here on the wasteland (perhaps under the stone
house's foundations overgrown with nettles) lived a very old Fairy-Tale.
None of the four friends was aware of it. All they did was play games.
The four friends never fell out and only once quarrelled when Tima
wanted to turn the malachite grasshoppers living on the wasteland into
little fiddlers while Arkady stubbornly insisted they should make a
cavalry squadron out of them.
"Who wants their squeaky music!" he objected.
But Tima batted his white eyelashes and said quietly, "But listen,
listen... How can you call it squeaky? After all, you can't do without
music."
"But you can without horses, can you?" yelled Arkady and began waving
his arms about. "How on earth will we catch the Black Knight? How will we
fight the kangapaws? On Crocopudra? Maybe astride your fiddlers?"
"Oh, come on, lads!" Danilka suddenly said loudly. He got a piece of
chalk out of his pocket and drew four fiery steeds on the part of the
fence where Crocopudra used to sit.
"Gosh!" said Arkady.
And they began to examine the horses but then all of a sudden noticed
that Anton was not with them. Then they turned round and Arkady exclaimed
in surprise, "What's up with you?"
"Has something got into your eye?" Danilka asked anxiously.
"Have you hurt yourself?" Tima asked quietly.
Anton smiled awkwardly and turned his face away.
"Oh, do stop it... I got a fright. I thought you were going to
quarrel..."
"Now, just you stop talking nonsense, Anton," said Danilka, his most
loyal friend. "How can we possibly quarrel? We've got Antarctica, don't
forget."
"I know," said Anton, smiling. "I just wondered..."
It was already late evening. Old Fairy-Tale had gone off to bed and
all the magic plants had vanished, leaving behind only ordinary burdocks
and hemp. But it was still just as quiet as on a remote island. And in
this silence the white horses slipped off the fence and vanished into the
dusk. But the boys didn't notice because they were sitting with their
arms round each other's sunburnt shoulders, and their legs all tangled
and their heads so close together that strands of Tima's and Danilka's
hair were tickling Anton cheeks.
And Anton whispered, "Do you know what's the greatest thing in the
world? That all of us live together in the same town. What would it be
like if we didn't? Awful!"
"Well, we'd..." Arkady began dreamily but then all of a sudden let
out a howl and jumped up.
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