Time Jumps. The Paradigm of Immortality. Vladimir Baranchikov

      ISBN 978-5-0060-6244-3

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      Prologue

      I’m Yellowstone, supervolcano. I spread myself comfortably on a vast plateau surrounded by ridges of the Rocky Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. My gigantic size strikes the boldest of imaginations: a 2800-meter above sea level, a crater destroyed by an eruption, forms a huge, fifty-seventy-kilometer, picturesque valley. The main decoration, my sparkling pearl, is Yellowstone Lake, a hundred meters deep, lying at the foot of my peak. I am a national pride named Yellow Stone, named after the yellow cliffs that border the source of the mountainous Yellowstone River. Did some pebble bestow the nickname of a giant? However, I do not murmur, because during the human habitation in my possessions, I also had other names in other languages. But for a volcano with a life story of sixteen million years, a hundred centuries is a real moment. I’ve seen a lot and it’s time to share one secret… I now sleep peacefully, releasing tons of steam and boiling water through the thousands of geysers sparkling in the fabulous beauty of a park with three hundred waterfalls. It is not for nothing that millions of tourists who have come here from all over the world admire me, and I sympathize with this pilgrimage, paying tribute to the enthusiasm and admired views of nature lovers.

      I confess: my sleepy state is deceptive and my character is wayward. From time to time, I explode with a force comparable to a major meteorite hitting Earth. I burst with my own indignation under the monstrous pressure of the melt of magma stored inside me. The enormous pressure of molten basalt, warmed to death, pushes the earth’s crust apart and rips it apart with a monstrous rumble. I salute the world with bright fireworks and the eruption of hot magma, which gives rise to amazing lava covers on the slopes, burning all life in its path. The walls of the crater collapse, and the surrounding earth subsides hundreds of meters into the void created under the crater. So a huge funnel is formed – a circular caldera – with a diameter of several kilometers. I adore scale.

      Over the course of my life, I have experienced more than a hundred and forty eruptions. For a volcano, it is as natural as a person to catch a cold and sneeze. The last three super-eruptions occurred 2 million, 1 million 300 thousand and 640,000 years ago. This cyclicity leads me to think that I am ripe for a new one, and it can happen at any time, possibly in 2075. Yes, I am almost ready for this: I feel my gut overflowing with fire, and I hardly restrain the tension. There, at the bottom of the caldera, under a thin partition of rocks, my gift to careless humanity lurks – death. After all, few people imagine how dangerous this is for planet Earth. The consequences will be catastrophic, and it is not my fault that the world will turn upside down – I warned. Or do you think I’m the one who needs to ring all the bells?

      PART 1. PETER KALINKIN

      CHAPTER 1. A STRANGE FIND

      It was a very hot summer in St. Petersburg that year. Yes, yes, it all started with the heat. The heat turned out to be a trigger, a trigger in this chain of amazing events that happened to Pyotr Mikhailovich Kalinkin. Pyotr Mikhailovich was tired of the noise and blue smoke of cars, the crush in traffic jams on the streets and in shops where carts with goods do not comply with traffic rules, and there are no traffic lights. Bedlam, that’s all! He returned home with my purchases and from the threshold to his wife:

      – That’s it, damn it, I can’t stay in the city anymore. Let’s go to nature tomorrow!

      – And where are we going to sing? – wiping the plate with a long towel draped over her shoulder, Galina Sergeevna asked.

      – How to go somewhere – to the Karelian Isthmus, to the lakes! We will stay at the hotel for a week, rest, change the situation. Then maybe we’ll look at a country house…

      That’s what he gave out so fateful or unwittingly anticipated? Even in a terrible dream, a peaceful foray into nature does not evoke the idea of an abyss, but in life – what the hell is not joking when God is asleep…

      Who knows how much a token is in the subway, he definitely saw Pyotr Mikhailovich – there are at least a dozen of them in one car. Hello to you, but here he is sitting opposite: a shabby black jacket, jeans made of stiff blue fabric, worn shoes and a BMW cap on his gray head. And next to her is a prim lady with stern eyes and a cap of dyed hair, in a gray raincoat, with a black bag and thick – soled shoes – Kalinkina Galina Sergeevna. In the evening, the Kalinkins will definitely stick on the telly: movies about animals and talk shows of naked tits are informative and fun, especially when you feel a certain similarity with the characters. The neighbor from above is sure that Pyotr Mikhailovich is a positive person with a touching weakness: more madly than his wife, he loves his rare “Lada” of pale green color, securely stored for forty years in the city parking lot under a high – voltage line, just five tram stops from home.

      In the morning, Pyotr Mikhailovich solemnly rolled his four-wheeled friend out of the garage and soon was slowly steering along the ring road, proudly ignoring the Toyota and Mercedes cars overtaking him. Two hours later, the couple reached the hotel “Rautu” in the center of the village of Sosnovo. From the windows of the hotel room, behind the guest parking lot, a picturesque lake could be seen pleasing the eye. A herd of white goats grazed on the shore, grazing grass, evoking thoughts of fresh milk and a healthy lifestyle.

      A week of rest in the countryside flew like a voucher over Russia – easily and serenely, without financial problems. The black cat did not run across the road, the women did not wander around with empty buckets, however, the midges in the forest had a bite – that was, that was. The Kalinkins wandered through the meadows, went to Ladoga and swam in Razdolinsky Lake, the water turned out to be very cool. But the greatest pleasure was the clean air, filled with the smell of herbs and pine needles, which was inhaled like a fragrant balm. Somehow Pyotr Mikhailovich decided to go fishing, but he did not grab spinning from the city in a hurry, admired the water surface at sunset and decided: it’s time to buy a cottage in these parts – a pension is on the horizon. He shared this idea with his wife.

      – We will start a small farm, a vegetable garden, we will plant flowers, – Galina Sergeevna supported her husband, and in her dreams she already imagined an idyllic picture of peace in nature: a warm breeze blows, butterflies flutter over broken flower beds, and bright red sides of ripe berries peek out from green strawberry bushes and cheerfully shine in the sun… So it almost came out, but only almost.

      Buying real estate is a troublesome business. Cheap offers, as well as money from the Kalinkins, were sparse, and these options were not particularly tempting: they examined old, dilapidated buildings near paved roads with a continuous flow of cars, visited a couple of semi-abandoned unfinished buildings remote from civilization in the middle of forests and fields, without water and electricity. Everything they had seen did not correspond to their ideas of suburban happiness, but the desire to breathe ozone away from the metropolis was so irresistible that after weighing all the pros and cons, the couple unanimously came to one optimal solution, in their opinion. No wonder – the wrong choice always seems more reasonable: a feasible budget for quarter acre of land with an old house in a small village, but with a well and a bathhouse, and a shop and a pharmacy nearby is an ideal option for a quiet and peaceful life of a pensioner. A woodshed with a supply of logs, rotten boards and poles, and a simple carpenter’s tool: an axe, a saw, a box with nails, a blunt scythe and sawhorses, has been preserved on a plot fenced with a dilapidated fence. But the main quarter acre of land value is a five – wall pre – war building, chopped from thick, with deep cracks, logs (as the former hostess assured – from mahogany), six by six meters, with a partition inside. According to the Kalinkins, the house has passed the test of time and met the

---

Скачать книгу