The Doomed City

1

Andrei suppressed the cramp in his stomach and swallowed the last spoonful of mush, then pushed his mess tin away with a feeling of revulsion and reached for his mug. The tea was still hot. Andrei wrapped his hand around the mug and started taking little sips, staring into the small, hissing flame of the gasoline lamp. The tea was unusually strong after standing for too long; it smelled like a birch-twig broom and it had a strange aftertaste, maybe from the cruddy water they’d collected after 820 kilometers, or maybe because Quejada had slipped his crappy remedy for diarrhea into all the command staff’s mugs again. Or maybe the mug simply hadn’t been properly washed—it felt especially greasy and sticky today.

In the street below his window he could hear the soldiers clattering their mess tins. The comic wit Tevosyan cracked some kind of gag about Skank and the soldiers started braying with laughter, but at that very moment Sergeant Vogel suddenly bellowed out in his Prussian voice, “Are you on your way to your post or to slip under the blanket with some woman, you low, creeping amphibian? Why are you barefoot? Where’s your footwear, you troglodyte?” A sullen voice responded that the troglodyte’s feet were chafed raw, and right through to the bone in some places. “Shut your mouth, you pregnant cow! Get those boots on immediately—and get to your post! Move it!”

Andrei wiggled the toes of his bare feet under the table, relishing the sensation. His feet had already recovered a bit on the cool parquet floor. If he just had a basin full of cold water… If he could stick his feet in it… He glanced into the mug. It was still half full of tea. To hell with it all, he thought, impulsively downing the remainder in three sensuous gulps. His stomach immediately started gurgling. For a while Andrei apprehensively listened to what was going on in there, then he put down the mug, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at the metal documents box. He ought to get out yesterday’s reports… I’m not in the mood. Right now I could just stretch out, snuggle up under my jacket, and grab an hour’s shut-eye…

Outside the window a tractor engine suddenly started furiously clattering. The remnants of glass in the window jangled, and a lump of plaster fell off the ceiling, landing beside the lamp. Trembling rapidly, the empty mug crept toward the edge of the table. Screwing up his entire face, Andrei got up, padded across to the window in his bare feet, and looked out.

He felt a breath of heat on his face from the street, which hadn’t cooled off yet, along with the caustic odor of exhaust fumes and the nauseating stench of heated oil. In the dusty light of a swiveling headlamp, bearded men were sitting right there in the road, lazily scrabbling in mess tins with spoons. All of them were barefoot, and almost all of them were naked to the waist. Their sweaty bodies gleamed white but their faces looked black, and their hands were black, as if they were all wearing gloves. Andrei suddenly realized that he didn’t recognize any of them. A troop of strange, unfamiliar naked monkeys. Sergeant Vogel stepped into the circle of light holding a huge aluminum kettle, and the monkeys immediately started excitedly fidgeting, jostling and holding out their mugs to the kettle. Pushing the mugs aside with his free hand, the sergeant started yelling, but Andrei could barely hear him above the rattling of the engine.

Andrei went back to the table, jerked open the lid of the box, and took out the logbook and yesterday’s reports. Another lump of plaster fell on the table from the ceiling. Andrei looked up. The room was immensely high—about four meters, or maybe even five. The molding on the ceiling had come away in places, so that he could see the lathwork, and that immediately aroused sweet memories of homemade jam pies, served with huge amounts of perfectly brewed, transparent tea in transparent, thin-walled glasses. With lemon. Or you could simply take an empty glass and collect as much pure, cold water as you wanted in the kitchen…

Andrei jerked his head, got up again, and walked obliquely right across the room to a huge bookcase. There was no glass in the doors, and there were no books either—just empty, dusty shelves. Andrei already knew that, but nonetheless he examined them one more time and even felt in the dark corners with his hand.

There was no denying the room was pretty well preserved. There were two perfectly decent armchairs in it, and another one with a torn seat of tooled leather that had once been luxurious. Several plain chairs stood in a row along the wall opposite the window, there was a little table with short legs in the middle of the room, and standing on the table was a cut-glass vase, with some sort of black, dried-up gunk inside it. The wallpaper had come loose on the walls, and even fallen away completely in some places, and the parquet floor had dried out and warped, but even so the room was in perfectly good condition—someone had lived here recently, no more than ten years ago.

It was the first time Andrei had seen such a well-preserved building since they passed the five-hundred-kilometer mark. After all those kilometers of neighborhoods burned to cinders and transformed into black, charred desert; after all those kilometers of continuous ruins, overgrown by prickly, brownish briars, and doddering, empty multistory boxes with collapsed floors absurdly towering up out of them; and kilometer after kilometer of waste lots, planted with rotten log-built houses with no roofs, where you could see right across the entire terrace from the road—from the Yellow Wall in the east to the edge of the precipice in the west—after all this, neighborhoods that were almost intact had appeared again, and a road paved with cobblestones, and perhaps there were people somewhere here—in any case, the colonel had ordered the sentries to be doubled.

I wonder how the colonel’s doing? The old man’s health has gone downhill a bit recently. But then, recently everyone’s health has gone downhill. It’s perfect timing that we’ll be spending the night under a roof for the first time in twelve days and not under the open sky. If we could just find water here, we could make this a long halt. Only it looks like there won’t be any water here either. At least, Izya says we shouldn’t count on finding any. Out of the whole herd of them, Izya and the colonel are the only ones who ever talk any sense.

There was a knock at the door, barely audible above the clatter of the tractor engine. Andrei hurried back to his seat, pulled on his jacket, opened the logbook, and barked, “Yes!”

It was only Duggan—a lean old man and a good match for his colonel: smoothly shaved, neat and tidy, every button fastened. “Permission to tidy up, sir?” he shouted.

Andrei nodded. Good God, he thought. What an effort it must take to keep yourself so smart in this shambles… And he isn’t even an officer, is he, not even a sergeant—he’s nothing but an orderly. A lackey. “How’s the colonel?” Andrei asked.

“Beg your pardon, sir?” Duggan froze, holding the dirty tableware in his hands, with one long, gristly ear turned toward Andrei.

“How is the colonel feeling?” Andrei roared, and that very second the engine outside fell silent.

“The colonel is drinking tea!” Duggan roared in the sudden silence, immediately adding in an embarrassed voice, “Beg your pardon, sir. The colonel is feeling passably well. He ate supper and now he is drinking tea.”

Andrei nodded absentmindedly and flipped over a few pages of the logbook.

“Will there be any instructions, sir?” Duggan inquired.

“No, thank you,” said Andrei.

When Duggan walked out, Andrei finally got started on yesterday’s reports. Yesterday he hadn’t recorded anything at all; he’d had the runs so bad, he barely managed to sit through to the end of the evening reporting session, and afterward he was in torment half the night—squatting out in the middle of the road with his bare ass pointed toward the camp, tensely peering into the gloom and straining his ears to catch any sounds, with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

“Day 28,” he inscribed on a clean page, and underscored what he had written with two thick lines. Then he took Quejada’s report.

“Distance covered 28 kilometers,” he noted down. “Height of sun 63°51ʹ13ʺ.2 (at 979 km). Average temperature: in the shade +23°C, in the sun +31°C. Wind 2.5 m/sec, humidity 0.42. Gravity 0.998. Drilling carried out at 979, 981, 986 km. No water. Fuel consumption…” he took Ellisauer’s report, badly soiled by oil-stained fingers, and spent a long time trying to decipher the chicken-scratch writing.

“Fuel consumption: 1.32 of daily norm. Remaining at end of day 28: 3,200 kg. Condition of engines: No. 1, satisfactory; No. 2, worn wrist pins and problems with the cylinders…”

Andrei wasn’t able to decipher what exactly had happened to the cylinders, although he held the sheet of paper right up close to the flame of the lamp.

“Condition of personnel: physical condition—almost everyone has abrasions on the feet and the general diarrhea continues, the rash on Permyak’s and Palotti’s shoulders is getting worse. No wounded, no injuries. No exceptional incidents. Shark wolves appeared twice and were driven away by shooting. Munitions expended 12 cartridges. Water expended 40 L. Remaining at end of day 28—1,100 kg. Foodstuff expended 20 daily rations. Remaining at end of day 28: 730 daily rations.”

Outside the window Skank started twittering in a shrill voice, and throats husky from smoking started braying hoarsely. Andrei raised his head and listened. The devil only knows, he thought. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that she tagged along with us. At least it’s some kind of amusement for the men… Only just recently they’ve started fighting over her.

There was another knock at the door.

“Come in,” Andrei said bad-temperedly.

Sergeant Vogel walked in—huge and red-faced, with wide, blurred patches of black sweat below the arms of his tunic. “Sergeant Vogel requests permission to address Mr. Counselor!” he barked, pressing his palms against his thighs and thrusting out his elbows.

“Go ahead, Sergeant,” said Andrei.

The sergeant squinted sideways at the window. “I request permission to speak in confidence,” he said, lowering his voice.

This is something new, Andrei thought with an ominous feeling. “Come on in and sit down,” he said.

The sergeant tiptoed up to the table, sat down on the very edge of an armchair, and leaned toward Andrei. “The men don’t want to go any farther,” he said in a low voice.

Andrei leaned back in his chair. So, he thought. This is what things have come to… Wonderful… Congratulations, Mr. Counselor… “What does that mean—they don’t want to. Who’s asking them?”

“They’re worn out, Mr. Counselor,” Vogel said in a confidential tone. “The tobacco’s almost finished. The diarrhea has worn them down. But worse than that—they’re frightened. It’s fear, Mr. Counselor.”

Andrei looked at him without speaking. He had to do something. Immediately. But he didn’t know exactly what.

“We haven’t seen a single human in eleven days of walking, Mr. Counselor,” Vogel went on, almost whispering. “Mr. Counselor recalls that we were warned there’d be thirteen days with no people in sight, and then—curtains for everyone. There are only two days left, Mr. Counselor.”

Andrei licked his lips. “Sergeant,” he said, “shame on you. An old war dog like you, believing old wives’ tales. I didn’t expect that of you!”

Vogel grinned crookedly, thrusting out his huge lower jaw. “Not at all, Mr. Counselor. You can’t frighten me. If only all of them out there…” He jabbed a large, gnarled finger at the window. “If only I had just Germans out there, or at least Japs, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Mr. Counselor. But what I’ve got out there is riffraff. Ities, Armenians or some such—”

“Stop right there, Sergeant!” Andrei said, raising his voice. “Shame on you. You don’t know the army regulations! Why are you addressing me unordered? What kind of laxness is this, Sergeant? On your feet!”

Vogel ponderously got up and stood to attention.

“Sit down,” Andrei said after a deliberate pause.

Vogel sat down as awkwardly as he had gotten up, and for a while neither of them spoke.

“Why have you come to me and not to the colonel?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Counselor. I did go to the colonel. Yesterday.”

“And what came of it?”

“The colonel was not inclined to take my report under consideration, Mr. Counselor.”

Andrei laughed. “Precisely! What kind of damned sergeant are you, if you can’t keep your own men in order?” They’re frightened, he tells me! Little children… “They should be afraid of you, Sergeant!” he bellowed. “Of you! Not the thirteenth day!”

“If only they were Germans…” Vogel began again morosely.

“What is all this?” Andrei asked cajolingly. “Do I, the head of the expedition, have to teach you what has to be done when subordinates mutiny, as if you were some snot-nosed kid? For shame, Vogel! If you don’t know, read the regulations. As far as I’m aware, this is all provided for there.”

Vogel grinned again, shifting his lower jaw. Evidently cases like this were not provided for in the regulations after all.

“I thought more highly of you, Vogel,” Andrei said harshly. “Much more highly! Get this into your head once and for all: no one is interested in whether your men want to go on or they don’t. We’d all like to be at home right now, not trudging through this scorching heat. Everyone’s thirsty, and everyone’s exhausted. But nonetheless everyone carries out their duty, Vogel. Is that clear?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Counselor,” Vogel growled. “Permission to leave?”

“On your way.”

The sergeant withdrew, ferociously stomping across the dried-out parquet in his boots.

Andrei took off his jacket and went over to the window again. The gathering seemed to have calmed down. The impossibly tall Ellisauer towered up in the circle of light, hunching over to examine some document—Andrei thought it was a map—that broad, bulky Quejada was holding up in front of him. A soldier emerged from the darkness, walked past them, and disappeared into a building—barefoot, seminaked, disheveled, carrying his automatic by the strap.

At the spot he had come from, another soldier’s voice called out in the darkness: “Beaky! Hey, Tevosyan!”

“What do you want?” a voice answered from an invisible cargo sled, where cigarettes flared up and faded away like fireflies.

“Turn the light this way! I can’t see a damned thing.”

“What do you need it for? Can’t you do it in the dark?”

“They’ve crapped everywhere here already… I don’t know where to step…”

“The sentry’s not supposed to go,” a new voice joined in from the throng. “Dump where you’re standing!”

“Aw, give me some light, for fuck’s sake! Is it too much bother to move your ass?”

Lanky Ellisauer straightened up, and in two strides he was beside the tractor and swiveled the headlamp to shine along the street. Andrei saw the sentry. Holding his lowered trousers with one hand, he was hovering uncertainly on bent knees beside the massive iron statue that some weirdos or other had put up right on the sidewalk at the nearest intersection. The statue represented a stocky character wearing something like a toga, with a shaved head and repugnant, toadish features. In the light of the headlamp the statue looked black. Its left arm pointed up to the heavens, and its right arm was stretched out above the earth, with the fingers of the hand splayed out. Right now an automatic rifle was hanging on that arm.

“Good job, thanks a bunch!” the sentry roared, overjoyed, and squatted down in a firm position. “You can shut it off now!”

“Come on, come on, get on with it!” someone encouraged him from the sled. “We’ll give you covering fire, if you need it…”

“Aw, shut off the light, guys!” the sentry begged, getting edgy.

“Don’t shut it off, Mr. Engineer,” a voice from the sled advised. “He’s joking. And the regulations don’t allow—”

But Ellisauer turned the light away after all. Andrei heard jostling and guffawing on the sled. Then two of the men started whistling a duet—some kind of march.

Everything’s just the same as ever, thought Andrei. If anything, they’re more cheerful than usual today. I didn’t hear any of these jokes yesterday or the day before. Maybe it’s the apartment houses? Yes, it could be that. Nothing but desert and more desert, but now there are houses! At least they can catch up on their sleep in peace; the wolves won’t bother them. Only Vogel’s no alarmist. Uh-uh, he’s not that kind… Andrei suddenly imagined himself tomorrow, giving the order to move out, but the men bunch up together, with their automatics bristling out, and say, “We won’t go!” Maybe that’s why they’re so cheerful right now—they’ve settled everything among themselves, already decided to turn back tomorrow (“…what can he do to us, the gutless jerk, the crummy office clerk?”) and now they couldn’t give a damn, they don’t have a care in the world, they don’t give a fuck… And Quejada, the bastard, is with them. He’s been whining for days now that it’s pointless to go any farther… he looks daggers at me during the evening reports… he’d only be delighted if I went creeping back to Heiger empty handed, with my tail between my legs…

Andrei shrugged his shoulders with a shudder. It’s your own fault, you wimp—you dropped the reins, you lousy democrat, you damned populist… You ought to have put that Hnoipek with the ginger hair up against the wall that first time, the slimeball, taken the whole gang by the throat in a single stroke—I’d have them all toeing the line now! And it was just the right opportunity! A gang rape, and a brutal one, and the victim was a native girl, an underage native girl… And the insolent way that Hnoipek grinned—that insolent, sated, loathsome grin—when I yelled at them… and the way they all turned green when I pulled out the revolver. Ah, Colonel, Colonel, you’re a liberal, not a combat officer! “Oh, why start shooting straightaway, Counselor? After all, there are other means of influence!” Uh-uh, Colonel. It’s obvious you can’t influence these Hnoipeks any other way… And after that everything went askew. The girl attached herself to the squad, I shamefully turned a blind eye (out of amazement, was that it?), and then the squabbling and brawling over her began… And again I should have interfered in the first fight, put someone up against the wall, had the girl flogged and slung her out of the camp… Only where could we sling her out to? We were already in the burned-out districts, there was no water there, the wolves had appeared…

Down in the street someone started furiously growling and swearing, something fell over and started clattering around, and a completely naked monkey came flying backward out of a doorway into the circle of light, landed smack on his ass, raising a cloud of dust, and before it could even pull up its legs, another monkey pounced like a tiger out of the same doorway, and they went at it tooth and claw, rolling around on the cobblestones, howling and snarling, wheezing and spitting, flailing at each other with all their might.

Andrei gripped the windowsill with one hand and dull-wittedly fumbled at his belt with the other, forgetting that his holster was lying in the armchair, but then Sergeant Vogel emerged from the darkness, swooping down like a sweaty black storm cloud driven by a hurricane, and hovering over the miscreants. And then he had grabbed one by the hair and the other by the beard, jerked them up off the ground, slammed them against each other with a dry crunch and tossed them away in opposite directions, like puppies.

“Very good, Sergeant!” the colonel’s weak but firm voice declared. “Tie the scoundrels to their beds for the night, and tomorrow put them in the advance guard out of turn for the whole day.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Colonel,” the sergeant replied, breathing heavily. He glanced to the right, where a naked monkey was scrabbling at the cobblestones, struggling to get up, and added uncertainly, “If I might make bold to report, Colonel, one isn’t ours. The cartographer Roulier.”

Andrei shook his head with a jerk, clearing a space in his throat, and roared in an unnatural voice. “Put cartographer Roulier in the advance guard for three days, with full combat gear. If the fight is repeated, shoot both of them on the spot!” Something cracked painfully in his throat. “Shoot all miscreants who dare to fight on the spot!” he croaked.

When he recovered his self-control, he was already seated at the table. Too late, probably, he thought, examining his dirty, trembling fingers. Too late. I should have acted sooner… But you’ll toe that line for me! You’ll do what you’re ordered to do! I’ll order half of you to be shot… I’ll shoot you myself… but the other half will toe the line for me. No more… No more! And Hnoipek gets the first bullet, whatever the circumstances. The first!

He rummaged behind his back, pulled out his holster and belt, and took out the pistol. The barrel was packed with dirt. He pulled back the bolt. It moved sluggishly, pulling back halfway and jamming in that position. Dammit, everything’s jammed, everything’s filthy… Outside the window it was quiet, with only the steel tips of the sentries’ boots clicking on the cobblestones in the distance, and someone blowing his nose on the ground floor and droning loudly through his teeth.

Andrei walked to the door and glanced out into the corridor. “Duggan!” he called in a low voice.

Something stirred in the corner. Andrei started and looked that way: it was the Mute. He was sitting in his usual pose, with his legs crossed over each other and interwoven in some highly complex fashion. His eyes glinted moistly in the semidarkness.

“Duggan!” Andrei called more loudly.

“Coming, sir!” a voice answered from somewhere deep inside the building. He heard footsteps.

“Why are you sitting here?” Andrei asked the Mute. “Come into the room.”

Without stirring from the spot, the Mute raised his broad face and looked at him.

Andrei went back to the table, and when Duggan knocked and glanced into the room, Andrei told him, “Clean up my pistol, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Duggan said respectfully, and took the pistol. At the door he moved aside to let Izya into the room.

“Aha, a lamp!” said Izya, heading straight for the table. “Listen, Andrei, have you got another lamp like that? I’m sick of using a flashlight—my eyes hurt…”

Izya had lost a load of weight over the last few days. All his clothes hung loose; everything on him was torn. And he stank like an old goat. But then, everyone stank that way. Apart from the colonel.

Andrei watched as Izya, taking no notice of anything, pulled over a chair, sat down, and moved the lamp across toward himself. Then he started taking old, crumpled papers out from under his jacket and laying them out in front of him. As he did this, he bobbed up and down on his chair in his habitual fashion, peering at the papers as if he were rifling through them, as if he were trying to read them all at once, and every now and then plucking at his wart. It was hard for him to get to the wart now, because his cheeks and neck and even, seemingly, his ears, were covered with an immensely thick coating of hair.

“Listen, why don’t you get a shave, really?” said Andrei.

“What for?” Izya asked absentmindedly.

“The whole command staff shaves,” Andrei said angrily. “You’re the only one walking around like a scarecrow.”

Izya raised his head and looked at Andrei for a while, exposing yellowish, long-unbrushed teeth among the hair. “Yes?” he said. “Well, you know, I’m not big on prestige. Look at the jacket I’m wearing.”

Andrei looked. “You could darn that too, by the way. If you don’t know how—let Duggan have it.”

“I think Duggan has enough to do without me… And by the way, who are you intending to shoot?”

“Whoever I need to,” Andrei said darkly.

“Well, well,” Izya said, and immersed himself in reading.

Andrei glanced at his watch. There were ten minutes to go. Andrei sighed and reached under the table, groped to find his shoes, pulled out the stiff socks and surreptitiously sniffed at them, then lifted up his right foot toward the light and examined the skinned heel. The abrasion had started healing over slightly, but it was still painful. Wincing in anticipation, he cautiously pulled on his rigid sock and moved his foot a bit. Wincing really hard now, he reached for his shoe. When he had his shoes on, he put on the belt with the empty holster, straightened his jacket, and buttoned it.

“Here,” said Izya, pushing a pile of papers covered in writing across the table to him.

“What’s that?” Andrei asked, totally uninterested.

“Paper.”

“Aah…” Andrei picked up the sheets of paper and put them in the pocket of his jacket. “Thank you.”

Izya was already reading again. Fast, like a machine.

Andrei remembered how much he hadn’t wanted to bring Izya on this expedition—with his absurd vegetable-plot-scarecrow appearance, with his provocatively Jewish features, with his insolent giggling, with his self-evident inability to handle heavy physical demands. It had been absolutely clear that Izya would cause him a heap of trouble, and the archivist would be pretty useless in field conditions verging on combat conditions. But things hadn’t turned out that way at all.

That’s to say, things had turned out that way as well. Izya was the first to skin his feet. Both of them at once. Izya was insufferable at the evening report sessions, with his idiotic, inappropriate little jokes and gratuitous informality. On the third day of the journey he managed to fall through into some kind of cellar, and the entire team had to help drag him out of there. On the sixth day he got lost and delayed their departure by several hours. During the skirmish at 340 kilometers he behaved like a total cretin and only survived by a miracle. The soldiers mocked him and Quejada constantly quarreled with him. Ellisauer turned out to hate all Jews on principle, and Andrei had to read him the riot act about Izya… It happened. It all happened.

And despite all this, pretty soon Izya turned out to be the most popular figure on the expedition, with the possible exception of the colonel. And even more popular in some ways. First, he found water. The geologists spent a long time vainly searching for springs, drilling rocks, sweating, and making exhausting forays during the general rest halts. Izya simply sat in a cargo sled under a grotesque improvised parasol and rummaged through old documents, of which he had accumulated several crates. And four times he predicted where to look for underground cisterns. True, one cistern was dried out, and the water in another was rank and fetid, but the expedition had twice discovered excellent water, thanks to Izya and only Izya.

Second, he found a cache of diesel oil, after which Ellisauer’s antisemitism had become largely abstract. “I hate yids,” he explained to his lead mechanic. “There’s nothing on Earth worse than a yid. But I’ve never had anything against Jews! Take Katzman, for instance…”

And what was more, Izya supplied everyone with paper. Their supplies of bathroom tissue had run out after the first outbreak of gastrointestinal disorders, and Izya’s popularity—as the only owner and custodian of paper wealth in country where you couldn’t find so much as a burdock leaf or a clump of grass—had risen to astronomical levels.

Less than two weeks went by before Andrei realized, with a certain degree of envy, that they all loved Izya. Everyone. Even the soldiers, which was absolutely incredible. During the halts, they jostled around him and listened openmouthed to his prattle. Without being asked, they lugged his metal crates of documents from place to place, taking pleasure in it. They complained to him and showed off to him like schoolboys with their favorite teacher. They hated Vogel, they were in awe of the colonel, they fought with the scientific staff, but with Izya, they laughed. And not at him but with him! “You know, Katzman,” the colonel said one day, “I never understood what commissars were needed for in an army, but I think I’d take you on for that job.”

Izya finished sorting out one batch of documents and extracted another one from under his jacket. “Is there anything interesting?” Andrei asked. He didn’t ask because he was really curious but simply because he wanted somehow to express the affection he suddenly felt at this moment for this clumsy, absurd man with his sleazy appearance.

Izya barely had time to give a brief nod. Before he could reply, the door swung open and St. James stepped into the room.

“With your permission, Counselor?” he said.

“Please come in, Colonel,” said Andrei, getting up. “Good evening.”

Izya jumped to his feet and moved up an armchair for the colonel.

“Most kind of you, Commissar,” the colonel said, and sat down slowly, in two stages. He looked the same as usual—trim and fresh, with a fragrance of eau de cologne and good tobacco—only his cheeks had become a little hollower just recently and his eyes had sunk in quite startlingly. And he didn’t walk around with his distinctive swagger stick any longer but with a long black cane, on which he noticeably leaned when he had to remain standing.

“That disgraceful fight under the windows…” said the colonel. “I apologize for my soldier, Counselor.”

“Let’s hope that was the last fight,” Andrei said morosely. “I don’t intend to tolerate this any longer.”

The colonel nodded absentmindedly. “Soldiers always fight,” he remarked casually. “In the British Army it’s actually encouraged. Fighting spirit, healthy aggression, and so on… But you are right, of course. In such arduous field conditions it’s quite intolerable.” He leaned back in his chair, took out his pipe, and started filling it. “But the potential enemy is still nowhere to be seen, is he, Counselor?” he said humorously. “In this connection, I foresee great complications for my poor general staff. And also for the Messrs. Politicians, to be frank.”

“On the contrary!” Izya exclaimed. “The hectic times are just about to start for all of us! Since no genuine enemy exists, he has to be invented. And as universal experience demonstrates, the most terrible enemy is an invented one. I assure you, it will be an incredibly gruesome monster. The army will have to be doubled in size.”

“So that’s how it is?” said the colonel, still in humorous vein. “I wonder who will invent him? Could it possibly be you, my commissar?”

“You!” Izya said triumphantly. “You, first and foremost.” He started counting on his fingers. “First, you will have to set up a department of political propaganda attached to the general staff—”

There was a knock at the door, and before Andrei could answer, Quejada and Ellisauer walked in. Quejada was sullen and Ellisauer was smiling down vaguely from somewhere right up under the ceiling.

“Please be seated, gentlemen.” Andrei greeted them coolly. He rapped his knuckles on the table and told Izya, “Katzman, we’re starting.”

Izya broke off in midword and eagerly turned his face toward Andrei, flinging one arm over the back of his chair. The colonel drew himself erect again and folded his hands on the knob of his cane.

“You have the floor, Quejada,” Andrei said.

The head of the science section was sitting right in front of him, with his fat weightlifter’s legs set wide apart to avoid getting damp in the crotch, and Ellisauer, as always, had installed himself behind Quejada’s back, hunching right over there so he wouldn’t stick out too much.

“Nothing new on the geology,” Quejada said sullenly. “The same clay and sand as before. No signs of water. The local water main here dried out a long time ago. Maybe that’s the reason why they left, I don’t know… The data on the sun, the wind, and so on…” He took a sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and tossed it across to Andrei. “That’s all I have for now.”

Andrei didn’t like that “for now” at all, but he just nodded and started looking at Ellisauer.

“And on transport?”

Ellisauer straightened up and started talking over Quejada’s head. “Today we covered thirty-eight kilometers. The motor of tractor number two needs to be laid up for a major overhaul. I very much regret, Mr. Counselor, but—unfortunately…”

“I see,” said Andrei. “What does that mean, a major overhaul?”

“Two or three days,” said Ellisauer. “Some elements will have to be replaced and others will need to be fixed. Maybe even four days. Or five.”

“Or ten,” said Andrei. “Give me your report.”

“Or ten,” Ellisauer agreed, still with the same vague smile. “I’m afraid to say exactly. We’re not in a garage here, and then my Permyak… he has some kind of rash, and he’s been vomiting all day long. He’s my lead mechanic, Mr. Counselor…”

“What about you?” asked Andrei.

“I’ll do everything I can… But the problem is, in our conditions… I mean, in field conditions…”

For a while he carried on babbling something about motor mechanics, about a crane that they hadn’t brought with them, although he had warned them, hadn’t he… about a bench drill that they didn’t have here and, unfortunately, couldn’t possibly have had here, about the motor mechanic again, and something else about wrist pins and pistons… With every minute that passed he spoke more and more quietly, less and less distinctly, and finally fell completely silent, and all this time Andrei stared him in the eye without looking away, and it was absolutely clear that this lanky, cowardly con artist had lied his way into a tight corner, and he’d already realized this, and he could see everyone else had realized it too, and he was trying to squirm out of it somehow, only he didn’t know how, but even so, he firmly intended to stick to his lies until the victory was won.

After that Andrei lowered his eyes and stared at Ellisauer’s report, at the slovenly lines scratched out in chicken-claw scribble, but he didn’t see or understand anything. They’ve conspired, the bastards, he thought in quiet despair. These men are in the conspiracy too. So now what do I do with them? A pity my pistol’s not here… Wallop Ellisauer… or frighten him so badly that he shits himself… No, it’s Quejada. Quejada’s the one in charge of them all. He wants to dump all the responsibility on me… He wants to dump this entire rotten, stinking lost cause on me, and only me… the scumbag, the fat pig… Andrei wanted to yell out loud and slam his fist down on the table with all his might.

The silence was becoming unbearable. Izya suddenly started nervously squirming on his chair and mumbling. “What actually is the problem here? After all, we’re not in any particular hurry to get anywhere. Let’s make a halt… There could be manuscripts in the buildings. There’s no water here, it’s true, but we can send a separate team on ahead for water…”

And at that point Quejada interrupted him. “Rubbish,” he said harshly. “No more idle talk, gentlemen. Let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s. The expedition has failed. We haven’t found water. Or oil. And there’s no way we could have found them with the geological prospecting organized like this. We tear along like lunatics; we’ve run the men into the ground and totally wrecked our transport. Discipline in the crew is shot to hell, we feed stray girls and ferry rumormongers around with us… All sense of perspective was lost a long time ago; no one gives a damn for anything. The men don’t want to go on, they can’t see why we need to go on, and there’s nothing we can tell them. The cosmographic data have simply turned out to be absolutely damned useless: we prepared for freezing polar conditions but we drove into a red-hot desert. The personnel for the expedition were badly selected, completely at random; the medical arrangements are appalling. And the result is that we get what we were bound to get: a slump in morale, a collapse of discipline, veiled insubordination, and today or tomorrow—mutiny. That’s all.”

Quejada stopped talking, took out a cigarette case, and lit up. “What are you actually suggesting, Mr. Quejada?” Andrei said in a stale, flat voice. That loathsome face with the fat mustache hovered in front of him, suspended in a web of blurred, indistinct lines. He really wanted to smash it good and hard. With the lamp. Right on that mustache…

“In my opinion, it’s absolutely obvious,” Quejada said contemptuously. “We have to pack it in and go back where we came from. Immediately. While we’re still in one piece.”

Keep calm, Andrei told himself. Right now, calm, nothing but calm. As few words as possible. No arguing, no matter what. Listen calmly and say nothing. Ah, how I’d love to whop him!

“Yes, really,” Ellisauer spoke up. “How long can we keep going? My men ask me, What’s going on here, Mr. Engineer? We agreed to keep going until the sun sank behind the horizon. But instead of sinking, it gets higher. And then we agreed to keep going until it reaches its zenith… But it doesn’t rise toward any zenith, it just keeps skipping up and down…”

Just don’t argue, Andrei kept telling himself. Let them babble. In fact it’s quite interesting to see what they’ll come up with… The colonel won’t betray me. The army decides everything. The army! Could they really have talked Vogel onto joining them, the bastards?

“And what do you say?” Izya asked Ellisauer. “You?”

“What about me?”

“Your men ask you, that’s clear enough… But how do you answer them?”

Ellisauer started shrugging his shoulders and wiggling his sparse eyebrows. “A strange question…” he mumbled as he did it. “What answer can I give them, I ask you? I’d like to know what answer I’m supposed to give them. How do I know?”

“That is, you don’t give them any answer?”

“But what answer can I give them? What? I tell them the boss knows best.”

“What an answer!” said Izya, glaring horrendously. “With answers like that you can demoralize an entire army, never mind the poor drivers… ‘Well guys, I’m ready to go back right now, only the big bad boss won’t let me…’ Do you even understand why we’re making this journey? You’re a volunteer, aren’t you—no one forced you to come!”

“Listen, Katzman…” Quejada tried to interrupt. “Let’s get down to brass tacks!”

“You knew it was going to be hard, didn’t you, Ellisauer? You did. You knew we weren’t going for a walk in the park, didn’t you? You did. You knew the City needed this expedition, didn’t you? You did—you’re an educated man, an engineer… You knew what the orders were, didn’t you: keep going as long as the fuel and water last? You knew that perfectly well, Ellisauer!”

“I’m not objecting, am I!” Ellisauer gabbled hastily, absolutely terrified. “I’m only trying to explain to you that my explanations… That is, I mean it’s not clear to me how I should answer them, because after all, they ask me—”

“Will you stop waffling, Ellisauer!” Izya said, closing in for the kill. “Everything’s perfectly clear: you’re afraid to go on, you’re conducting moral sabotage, you’ve demoralized your own subordinates, and now you’ve come running here to complain… And you, by the way, don’t even have to walk. You ride all the time…”

Go on, Izya, give it to him, buddy, Andrei thought lovingly. Whop him, the motherfucker, whop him! He’s already shit himself, now he’ll ask to go to the john…

“And I don’t understand at all what all this panic is about,” Izya continued without easing up. “So the geology’s come up short. To hell with the geology—we’ll get by without any geology. And we’ll get by even more easily without any cosmography… Surely it’s clear that our main job is reconnaissance, collecting information. I personally can vouch that to date the expedition has already achieved a great deal, and it can do even more. The tractor’s broken down? So fine, let them repair it here, two days or ten, I don’t know—let’s leave the sickest and most exhausted men and move ahead gently on the other tractor. If we find water, we’ll stop and wait for the others. It’s all very simple, you know; it’s no big deal…”

“Sure, it’s all very simple, Katzman,” Quejada said acidly. “How would you like a bullet in the back, Katzman? Or in the forehead? You’ve gotten too carried away with your archives, you don’t notice anything going on around you. The soldiers won’t go any farther. I know it. I heard them deciding for themselves…”

Ellisauer suddenly sprang up from behind him and dashed out of the room, mumbling incoherent apologies and demonstratively clutching his stomach. The rat, Andrei thought savagely. The cowardly swine. The gutless shit…

Quejada seemed not to have noticed anything. “Out of all my geologists, there’s only one man I can rely on,” he continued. “The soldiers and the drivers can’t be relied on at all. Of course, you can shoot one or two of them to frighten the rest… maybe that would help. I don’t know. I doubt it. And I’m not sure you have the moral right to do that. They don’t want to go on because they feel cheated. Because they’ve gotten nothing out of this expedition, and now they have no hope of getting anything. The wonderful legend that Mr. Katzman so opportunely invented—the legend of the Crystal Palace—doesn’t work anymore. Different legends have overshadowed it now, you know, Mr. Katzman…”

“What the hell do you mean?” said Izya, stammering from indignation. “I didn’t invent anything!”

Quejada brushed that off almost affably: “All right, all right, that’s immaterial now. It’s already clear that there’s not going to be any palace, so there’s nothing to talk about. You know perfectly well, gentlemen, that three-quarters of your volunteers came on this expedition for booty, and only for booty. And what have they received instead of booty? Bloody diarrhea and a vermin-ridden idiot for their nocturnal frolics… But even that’s not the point. As if the disappointment wasn’t enough, they’re scared too. Let’s thank Mr. Katzman. Let’s thank Mr. Pak, to whom we have so graciously offered bed and board with our expedition. Thanks to the efforts of these gentlemen, we have learned a vast amount about what lies in store for us if we continue our advance. The men are afraid of the thirteenth day. The men are afraid of talking wolves. The shark wolves weren’t enough for us, so we’ve been promised talking ones! The men are afraid of Ironheads. And together with what they’ve already seen—all these mutes with their tongues cut out, abandoned concentration camps, all these cretins who have reverted to savagery and pray to springs, and the well-armed cretins who fire at you out of the blue, without rhyme or reason… together with what they’ve seen today, here, in these houses—those bones in the barricaded apartments… it all makes a delightful and impressive combination! And if yesterday what the men were most afraid of in the entire world was Sergeant Vogel, today they couldn’t give a rotten damn for Vogel—they have more terrifying things to fear.”

Quejada finally stopped talking, caught his breath, and wiped away the sweat that had sprung out on his fat face. And then the colonel lifted one eyebrow ironically and said, “I have the impression that you are thoroughly frightened yourself, Mr. Quejada. Or am I mistaken?”

Quejada squinted at him with a red eye. “Don’t you worry about me, Colonel,” he growled. “If I’m afraid of anything, it’s a bullet between the shoulder blades. Out the blue. From men I sympathize with, by the way.”

“So that’s it?” said the colonel. “Well now… I don’t presume to judge the importance of the present expedition, and I don’t presume to tell the leader of the expedition how he ought to act. My job is to carry out orders. However, I feel obliged to state that I consider all this discussion of mutiny and insubordination to be idle prattle. Leave my soldiers to me, Mr. Quejada! If you like you can also leave to me those of your geologists that you don’t trust. I’ll be glad to deal with them… I must point out to you, Counselor,” he continued with the same devastating politeness, “that today too much is being said about the soldiers by precisely those individuals who have no official connection with the soldiers—”

“The individuals talking about the soldiers,” Quejada interrupted angrily, “work round the clock with them, and eat and sleep beside them.”

In the silence that followed, a leather armchair quietly creaked as the colonel sat completely upright. He said nothing for a while. The door opened quietly and Ellisauer snuck back to his place with a sour smile, bowing slightly as he walked.

Come on, Andrei mentally urged the colonel, staring at him with all his might. Come on, whop him! Right on the mustache! Whop his ugly mug, whop it!

The colonel finally spoke: “I am obliged to draw to your attention, Counselor, that today a certain section of the command staff has evinced sympathy for and, even worse, connivance at perfectly understandable and ordinary but entirely unacceptable sentiments among the lower ranks of the army. As the senior officer, I have the following declaration to make: If the aforementioned connivance and sympathy should assume any practical forms, I shall deal with the connivers and sympathizers as is appropriate to deal with such individuals in field conditions. Other than that, Mr. Counselor, I have the honor to assure you that the army remains ready henceforth to carry out any commands you may give.”

Andrei quietly caught his breath and gave Quejada a jubilant look. Quejada was smiling crookedly as he lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. Andrei couldn’t see Ellisauer at all.

“And exactly how are connivers and sympathizers dealt with in field conditions?” Izya inquired with tremendous curiosity; he was jubilant too.

“They are usually hanged,” the colonel replied drily.

Silence fell again. So there now, thought Andrei. I hope that’s all clear. Mr. Quejada? Or perhaps you have questions? You don’t have any questions, no way! It’s the army! The army decides everything, my friends… But even so, I don’t understand anything, he thought. Why is he so confident? Or maybe it’s only a mask, Colonel? I look very confident right now too, don’t I? At least, that’s the way I’m supposed to look… I’m obliged to.

He squinted warily at the colonel, who was still sitting up very straight, with his extinct pipe firmly clutched in his teeth. And he was very pale. Perhaps it’s merely anger. Let’s hope it’s just down to anger… To hell with it, to hell with it, Andrei thought frantically. A long halt! Right now! And Katzman can find me water. Lots of water. For the colonel. Just for the colonel. And starting tonight the colonel gets a double ration of water!

Ellisauer, all twisted out of shape, leaned out from behind Quejada’s fat shoulder and squeaked pitifully. “Please… I’ve got to go… Again…”

“Sit down,” Andrei told him. “We’re just finishing up.” He leaned back in the armchair and grasped the armrests. “Orders for tomorrow. I’m declaring a long halt. Ellisauer! Put all your men on the faulty tractor. I give you three days; kindly get it done in that time. Quejada. All day tomorrow, attend to the sick. The day after tomorrow, be prepared to accompany me on deep reconnaissance. Katzman, you will go with us… Water!” He tapped his finger on the table. “I need water, Katzman! Colonel! Tomorrow I order you to rest. The day after tomorrow you will take command of the camp. That’s all, gentlemen. Dismissed.”

2

Shining the flashlight down at his feet, Andrei hurried upstairs to the next floor—he thought it was the fifth at this point. Dammit, I’m not going to make it… He stopped for a moment, tensing every muscle as he waited for an acute urge to pass. Something in his belly churned with a muted glug and he felt a bit better. The fiends, they’ve fouled every level—there’s nowhere left to step… He reached the landing and pushed on the very first door. The door half-opened with a squeak, and Andrei squeezed in through the opening and sniffed. It didn’t seem too bad… He shone his flashlight around… Right beside the door, on the dried-out parquet, white bones lay in a tangle of stiffened rags, and a skull with clumps of hair caked on it grinned toothily. Clear enough: they looked inside and took fright. Moving his legs unnaturally, Andrei almost ran along the passage. The parlor… Dammit, something like a bedroom… Where’s their john? Ah, there it is…

Afterward, feeling calm, although the griping in his gut still hadn’t completely subsided and he was covered in cold, sticky sweat, he walked back out into the corridor and took the flashlight out of his pocket again. The Mute was right on cue, standing there, leaning his shoulder against some kind of endlessly tall, polished cupboard, with his large hands thrust in under his broad belt.

“Standing guard?” Andrei asked him with casual affability. “You do that, stand guard, or someone might sneak round a corner and stick a knife in my back—then what will you do?”

Andrei suddenly realized he’d gotten into the habit of talking to this strange man as if he were a huge dog, and he felt embarrassed. Giving the Mute a friendly pat on his cool, naked shoulder, he set off along the corridor, no longer hurrying, shining the flashlight right and left. Behind him he could hear the Mute’s soft footsteps following, neither moving closer nor falling back.

This apartment was more luxurious. Lots of rooms packed with heavy antique furniture, massive chandeliers, huge, blackened paintings in museum-style frames. But almost all the furniture was smashed: armrests had been torn off armchairs, chairs without legs were scattered around the floor, doors had been ripped off wardrobes. Did they use the furniture to heat the place, then? Andrei thought. In this heat? Strange…

To be honest, the entire house was a bit strange—he could completely understand the soldiers. Some apartments were standing wide open, and they were simply empty, absolutely nothing but the bare walls. Others were locked from the inside, sometimes even barricaded with furniture, and if you managed to break in, there were human bones lying on the floor. It was the same in the other houses nearby, and they could assume the picture would be the same in the other houses of this district.

None of this seemed to make any sense at all, and so far even Izya Katzman hadn’t come up with any sensible way to explain why some of the residents of these houses fled, taking with them everything they could carry, even books, and others had barricaded themselves in their homes, only to die there, apparently from hunger and thirst. And maybe from cold, too—in some of the apartments they had discovered wretched little iron stoves, and in others fires had clearly been lit directly on the floor, or on sheets of rusty iron that most likely had been torn off the roof.

“Do you understand what happened here?” Andrei asked the Mute.

The Mute slowly shook his head.

“Have you ever been here before?”

The Mute nodded.

“Did anyone live here then?”

No, the Mute signaled.

“I see,” Andrei muttered, trying to make out what was represented in a blackened painting. He thought it was some kind of portrait. Apparently of a woman…

“Is this place dangerous?” he asked.

The Mute looked at him with absolutely still eyes.

“Do you understand the question?”

Yes.

“Can you answer it?”

No.

“Well, thanks for that at least,” Andrei said thoughtfully. “So maybe things aren’t too bad after all. OK, let’s go home.”

They went back to the second floor. The Mute stayed in his corner, and Andrei went through into his room. Pak the Korean was already waiting for him, talking to Izya about something. When he saw Andrei, he stopped speaking and got up to greet him.

“Sit down, Mr. Pak,” Andrei said, and sat down himself.

After a very slight pause, Pak cautiously sank down onto the seat of his chair and put his hands on his knees. His yellowish face was calm, and his sleepy eyes glinted through the cracks between his puffy eyelids. Andrei had always liked him—in some subtle way Pak reminded him of Kensi, or maybe it was simply that he was always neat and clean, always good-natured and amiable with everyone, but without any familiarity; he was laconic, but polite and respectful—always a little apart, always keeping a subtle distance… Or maybe because it was Pak who put a stop to that absurd skirmish at 340 kilometers: when the shooting was at its height, he walked out of the ruins, holding up his open hand and slowly advancing toward the shots…

“Did they wake you up, Mr. Pak?” Andrei asked.

“No, Mr. Counselor. I hadn’t gone to bed yet.”

“Is your stomach bothering you a lot?”

“No more than everyone else’s.”

“But probably no less,” Andrei remarked. “And how are your feet?”

“Better than everyone else’s.”

“That’s good,” said Andrei. “And how are you feeling in general? Are you completely worn out?”

“I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Counselor.”

“That’s good,” Andrei repeated. “The reason why I bothered you, Mr. Pak, is that I’ve declared a long halt tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow I intend to make a short reconnaissance sortie with a special group. Fifty to seventy kilometers ahead. We have to find water, Mr. Pak. We’ll probably travel light but move fast.”

“I understand you, Mr. Counselor,” said Pak. “I request permission to join you.”

“Thank you. I was going to ask you to do that. So we leave the day after tomorrow, promptly at six in the morning. You’ll be issued field rations by the sergeant. Agreed? Now let me ask you this: What do you think, will we succeed in finding water here?”

“I think so,” said Pak. “I’ve heard a thing or two about these parts. There ought to be a spring here somewhere. According to the rumors, there was a very abundant spring here. It has probably been depleted now. But it might possibly be enough for our team. We need to check it out.”

“But maybe it has completely dried up?”

Pak shook his head. “It’s possible, but highly unlikely. I’ve never heard of springs completely drying up. The flow of water can be reduced, even greatly reduced, but apparently springs don’t dry up completely.”

“I haven’t found anything helpful in the documents yet,” said Izya. “Water was supplied to the town via an aqueduct, and now that aqueduct is as dry as… as I don’t know what.”

Pak said nothing to that.

“And what else have you heard about these city blocks?” Andrei asked him.

“Various more or less terrible things,” said Pak. “Some are clearly tall tales. And as for the rest…” He shrugged.

“Well, for instance?” Andrei asked amiably.

“Well, basically I’ve already told you all this before, Mr. Counselor. For instance, according to the rumors, the so-called City of the Ironheads is somewhere not far from here. But I haven’t been able to understand just who these Ironheads are… The Bloody Waterfall—but it seems that is still a long way off. Probably what we’re talking about is a stream of water that erodes some red-colored kind of rock. At least there’ll be plenty of water there. There are legends about talking animals—that’s already pushing the bounds of probability. And it clearly makes no sense to talk about what lies beyond those bounds… But then, the Experiment is the Experiment.”

“You’re probably sick and tired of all these questions,” Andrei said with a smile. “I can imagine how weary you are of repeating the same thing to everyone for the twentieth time. But please excuse us, Mr. Pak. After all, you are better informed than any of us.”

Pak shrugged again. “Unfortunately, the value of my knowledge is not very high,” he said drily. “Most of the rumors are not borne out. And vice versa—we come across many things that I have never heard anything about… And as far as the questions are concerned, does it not seem to you, Mr. Counselor, that the common soldiers in the team are too well informed when it comes to rumors? I personally only answer questions when I’m talking with someone from the command staff. I don’t consider it right, Mr. Counselor, for the privates and other rank-and-file members of the expedition to be aware of all these rumors. It’s bad for morale.”

“I entirely agree with you,” said Andrei, trying not to look away. “And in any case, I would prefer a few more rumors about a land flowing with milk and honey.”

“Yes,” said Pak. “And that’s why, when the soldiers ask me questions, I try to avoid unpleasant subjects and mostly dwell on the legend of the Crystal Palace… Although just recently they don’t want to hear about that anymore. They’re all seriously afraid and want to go home.”

“And you too?” Andrei asked sympathetically.

“I don’t have a home,” Pak said calmly. His face was inscrutable; his eyes turned absolutely somnolent.

“Mmm, yes,” Andrei said, and drummed his fingers on the table. “Well then, Mr. Pak. Thank you once again. Do please get some rest. Good night.”

He watched as Pak’s blue-twill-clad back receded, waited until the door closed, and said, “I’d really like to know why he tagged along with us.”

“What do you mean, why?” Izya asked with a start. “They couldn’t organize their own reconnaissance, so they asked to join up with you.”

“And what exactly do they need reconnaissance for?”

“Well, my dear friend, not everyone finds Heiger’s kingdom as congenial as you do! They didn’t want to live under Mr. Mayor before—that doesn’t surprise you, now does it? And now they don’t want to live under Mr. President. They want to live by themselves, you understand?”

“I understand,” said Andrei. “Only, in my opinion, no one intends to prevent them living by themselves.”

“That’s your opinion,” said Izya. “You’re not the president, are you?”

Andrei reached into a metal box, took out a flat flask of neat alcohol, and started unscrewing the cap.

“Surely you don’t imagine,” said Izya, “that Heiger will tolerate a strong, well-armed colony right there beside him? Two hundred men, seasoned in battle after battle, just three hundred kilometers from the Glass House! Of course he won’t leave them in peace. So they have to move farther north. But where to?”

Andrei splashed alcohol on his hands and rubbed his palms together as vigorously as he could. “I’m so damned sick of all this filth,” he muttered with revulsion. “You have absolutely no idea…”

“Yessiree, filth…” Izya said absentmindedly. “Filth sure ain’t sugar… Tell me, why are you always hassling Pak? What has he done to annoy you? I’ve known him for a long time, almost from the very first day. He’s an absolutely honest, highly cultured individual. So why do you hassle him? Only your feral hatred of the intelligentsia can explain these interminable, jesuitical interrogations. If you’re really that desperate to find out who’s spreading the rumors, interrogate your own informers, but Pak’s got nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t have any informers,” Andrei said icily.

Neither of them spoke for a few moments.

Then on a sudden impulse, Andrei asked, “Do you want an honest answer?”

“Well?” Izya said avidly.

“Well then, my friend, recently I’ve started getting the feeling that someone very much wants to call a halt to our expedition. A complete halt, do you understand? Not just get us to turn tail and go home, but finish us off. Wipe us out. So we disappear without a trace, do you understand?”

“Oh brother, come on!” said Izya. His fingers rummaged in his beard with a squeaky sound, searching for the wart.

“Yes, yes! And I keep trying to figure out who stands to gain from that. And it turns out that your Pak stands to gain. Quiet! Let me finish! If we disappear without a trace, Heiger won’t find out anything—not about the colony or anything else… And it will be a long time before he decides to organize another expedition like this one. Then they won’t have to move farther north and pull up their roots. That’s the conclusion I come to, do you understand?”

“I think you’re out of your mind,” said Izya. “Where do these feelings of yours come from? If they’re about turning tail and going home, you don’t need any feelings. Everyone wants to turn back… But where do you get the idea that someone wants to wipe us out?”

“I don’t know!” said Andrei. “I told you, it’s a feeling…” He paused for a moment. “In any case, it was the right decision to take Pak with me the day after tomorrow. I’m not leaving him hanging around in this camp when I’m not here.”

“But what has he got to do with all this?” Izya snapped. “Just take that addled brain of yours and think about it! So he wipes us out, and then what? Eight hundred kilometers on foot? Across arid desert?”

“How should I know?” Andrei snapped back. “Maybe he can drive a tractor.”

“Why not suspect Skank while you’re at it?” said Izya. “Like that… like in the fairy tale about Tsar Dadon. The Queen of Shamakha.”

“Mmm, yes… Skank,” Andrei said pensively. “Another blasted dark horse… And that Mute… Who is he? Where’s he from? Why does he follow me everywhere, like a dog? Even to the john… And by the way, it turns out that he’s been in these parts before.”

“What a discovery!” Izya said scornfully. “I realized that ages and ages ago. Those tongueless people arrived here from the north…”

“Maybe someone cut their tongues out here?” Andrei said in a low voice.

Izya looked at him. “Listen, let’s have a drink,” he said.

“There’s nothing to dilute it with.”

“Then would you like me to bring Skank to you?”

“You go to hell…” Andrei got up, wincing as he moved his sore foot about in his shoe. “OK, I’ll go check out what’s going on.” He slapped his empty holster. “Have you got a pistol?”

“I’ve got one somewhere. Why?”

“Never mind, I’ll go as I am,” said Andrei.

He walked into the corridor, taking out his flashlight on the way. The Mute got up to meet him. On the right, from inside the apartment behind a half-open door, Andrei heard low voices. He stopped.

“In Cairo, Duggan, in Cairo!” the colonel insisted grandly. “I see now that you’ve forgotten everything, Duggan. The Twenty-First Yorkshire Fusiliers, and their commander at the time was old Bill, the fifth Baronet Stratford.”

“I beg your pardon, Colonel,” Duggan protested respectfully. “We could consult the colonel’s diaries…”

“Don’t bother, no diaries needed, Duggan! Attend to your pistol. You promised to read to me tonight as well.”

Andrei walked out onto the landing and ran into Ellisauer, standing there like a telegraph pole. Ellisauer was smoking, hunched over with his backside propped against the iron banister.

“Last one before bed?” Andrei asked.

“Precisely, Mr. Counselor. I’m just on my way.”

“Off to bed, off to bed,” Andrei said he walked on past. “You know the saying: the more you sleep, the less you sin.”

Ellisauer giggled respectfully as Andrei walked away. You half-witted beanpole, Andrei thought. You just try not getting that done in three days—I’ll harness you to the sled…

The lower ranks had installed themselves on the ground-floor level (although they’d gotten into the habit of crapping on the upper floors). He couldn’t hear any conversations here—apparently all of them, or almost all, were already sleeping. The apartment doors leading into the lobby were wide open—left that way to create a draft—and through them emerged a discordant medley of snoring, sleepy smacking of lips, muttering, and hoarse heavy-smoker coughing.

Andrei first of all glanced into the apartment on his left. The soldiers had occupied this one. He saw light coming from a little room with no windows. Sergeant Vogel was sitting at a small table in just his shorts, with his peaked cap tilted to the back of his head, diligently filling out some kind of record sheet. There was good order in the army; the door of the little room was standing wide open so that no one could come in or go out unnoticed. At the sound of steps, the sergeant quickly raised his head and peered, shielding his face from the light of the lamp.

“It’s me, Vogel,” Andrei said in a quiet voice, and walked in.

In a flash the sergeant had moved up a chair for him. Andrei sat down and looked around. So there was good order in the army. All three cans of disbursable water were here. The boxes of canned goods and hardtack for tomorrow’s breakfast were here too. And a box of cigarettes. The sergeant’s superbly cleaned pistol was lying on the table. The room had an oppressive, male, field-campaign odor. Andrei set one hand on the back of the chair.

“What’s for breakfast, Sergeant?” he asked.

“The usual, Mr. Counselor,” Vogel replied in surprise.

“See if you can think up something different from the usual,” said Andrei. “Rice porridge with sugar, maybe… Is there any canned fruit left?”

“It could be rice porridge with prunes,” the sergeant suggested.

“Make it with prunes, then. Issue a double ration of water in the morning. And a half bar of chocolate for every man… We do still have chocolate?”

“We have a little bit,” the sergeant said reluctantly.

“Then issue it… What about cigarettes—the last box?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Well, nothing can be done there. Tomorrow as usual, and starting the next day reduce the ration… Ah yes, and another thing. From now on, starting today, a double water ration for the colonel.”

“I beg to report, sir—” the sergeant began.

“I know,” Andrei interrupted. “Tell him it’s an order from me.”

“Yes, sir… Would the counselor care to… Anastasis? Where are you going?”

Andrei looked around. A soldier, also wearing only his shorts and boots, was standing, swaying unsteadily, in the passage, totally addled with sleep.

“Sorry, Sergeant…” he muttered. He was obviously completely out of it. Then his arms straightened out against his sides. “Permission to absent myself to visit the latrine, Sergeant?”

“Do you need paper?”

The soldier smacked his lips and wiggled his face.

“Negative. I have some.” He held out a scrap of paper clutched in his fist, obviously from Izya’s archives. “Permission to go?”

“Granted… I beg your pardon, Mr. Counselor. They’ve been running all night. And sometimes they just go right where they are. The manganese crystals used to help, but now nothing does any good… Would you care to check the sentries, Mr. Counselor?”

“No,” Andrei said, getting up.

“Will you order me to accompany you?”

“No. Stay here.”

Andrei went back out into the lobby. It was just as hot here, but at least the stink wasn’t quite so bad. The Mute soundlessly appeared beside him. He heard Private Anastasis stumble and hiss through his teeth on the steps one floor higher. He’ll never get to the john; he’ll dump it on the floor, Andrei thought with queasy sympathy.

“Right, then,” he said to the Mute in an undertone. “Shall we check out how the civilians have settled in?”

He walked across the lobby and in through the door of the apartment opposite. The field-campaign odor hung in the air here too, but the good order of the army was lacking. A dimmed lamp in the passage faintly illuminated an untidy, jumbled heap of instruments in tarpaulin covers and guns, a dirty rucksack with its contents chaotically dragged out, and canteens and mess tins dumped by the wall. Andrei took the lamp and stepped into the nearest room, and immediately stumbled over someone’s shoe.

The drivers were sleeping here, naked and sweaty, stretched out on crumpled sheets of tarpaulin. They hadn’t even laid out any bedsheets… But then, he supposed, the bedsheets were probably dirtier than the tarpaulin. One of the drivers suddenly raised himself and sat upright, without opening his eyes, fiercely scratched at his shoulders, and mumbled indistinctly, “We’re going hunting, not to the bathhouse. Hunting, got that? The water’s yellow… under the snow it’s yellow, got that?” Without finishing what he was saying, he went limp again and slumped over onto his side.

After checking that all four drivers were there, Andrei moved on to the next apartment. This was the residence of the intelligentsia. They were sleeping on folding camp beds, covered with gray sheets, and they, too, were sleeping restlessly, snoring unhealthily, groaning, and gritting their teeth. Two cartographers in one room and two geologists in the next one. In the geologists’ room Andrei caught an unfamiliar, sweetish smell, and immediately remembered the rumors going around that the geologists smoked hash. The day before yesterday Sergeant Vogel had confiscated a reefer from Private Tevosyan, thumped him in the face, and threatened to put him in the advance guard and leave him there to rot. And although the colonel had taken a rather humorous view of the incident, Andrei had found it all very disturbing.

The other rooms in the huge apartment were empty, except for the kitchen, where Skank was sleeping, completely swaddled in rags—they had obviously worn her out this evening. Her skinny, naked legs, sticking out from under the rags, were covered in raw grazes and some kind of blotches. Yet another disaster visited on us, Andrei thought. The Queen of Shamakha. Damn the rotten bitch to hell. The filthy whore… Where is she from? Who is she? Babbling her gibberish in an incomprehensible language… Why is there an incomprehensible language in the City? How is that possible? Izya was totally floored when he heard it… Skank. That’s the name Izya gave her. A good name. It really suits her. Skank.

Andrei went back to the drivers’ room, lifted the lamp up over his head, and pointed out Permyak to the Mute. Silently slipping through between the sleeping men, the Mute leaned down over Permyak and took hold of the man’s ears in his hands. Then he straightened up. Permyak sat there, propping himself up with one hand and using the other to wipe away the spittle that had overflowed onto his lips in his sleep.

Catching his eye, Andrei nodded in the direction of the corridor, and Permyak immediately got to his feet, lightly and soundlessly. They went through into an empty room deeper inside the apartment, and the Mute closed the door firmly and leaned back against it. Andrei looked for a place to sit. The room was empty, and he sat down on the floor. Permyak squatted down in front of him. His pockmarked face had a dirty look in the lamplight, and his tangled hair tumbled down over his forehead, with a crooked tattoo—KHRUSHCHEV’S SLAVE—showing through it.

“Thirsty?” Andrei asked in a low voice.

Permyak nodded. The familiar roguish smile appeared on his face. Andrei took a hip flask out of his back pocket and held it out to him—there was water splashing about in the bottom of it. He watched as Permyak drank in miserly little sips, with his bristly Adam’s apple moving up and down. The water immediately sprang out on his body as sweat.

“Warm…” Permyak said hoarsely, handing back the empty flask. “Cold would be good… straight out of the faucet… Agh!”

“What’s wrong with that motor of yours?” Andrei asked, stuffing the flask back in his pocket.

Permyak gathered the sweat off his face with his splayed fingers. “The motor’s shit,” he said. “We built it after the first one, racing against the deadline… It’s a miracle it held out for this long.”

“Can it be fixed?”

“Yes, it can be fixed. We’ll fiddle with it for a day or two and get it fixed. Only it won’t last long. We’ll slog on for maybe another two hundred kilometers, and then we’ll be back sunbathing. The motor’s shit.”

“I see,” said Andrei. “Did you happen to notice the Korean Pak hanging around the soldiers?”

Permyak peevishly disregarded that question. “At today’s lunch break the soldiers got together and agreed not to go any farther.”

“I already know that,” Andrei said, clenching his teeth. “You just tell me who’s running things on their side, will you?”

“I can’t make that out, boss,” Permyak wheezed in a whisper. “Tevosyan shoots his mouth off more than anyone else, but he’s always full of crap, and every morning lately he’s been wigged out.”

“What?”

“Wigged out… You know, stoned, tripping… No one listens to him. But who the real ringleader is, I can’t tell.”

“Hnoipek?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe it’s him. He’s a big man, all right… Seems like the drivers are for it—I mean, not going any farther. Nothing Mr. Ellisauer says makes any sense; he just giggles like a creep and tries to please everyone… which means he’s afraid. But what can I do? I just keep laying it on the line that the soldiers can’t be trusted, they hate us drivers. We ride and they walk, that’s what they say. They get private’s rations, and we get the same as the gentlemen scientists… Why should they like us, they say. It used to work all right, but not any longer. But you know the most important thing? The day after tomorrow is the thirteenth day—”

“And what about the science team?” Andrei interrupted.

“Damned if I know. They cuss a blue streak, but I can’t make out who they’re for. They brawl with the soldiers every damned day over that Skank… And you know what Mr. Quejada said? He said the colonel won’t hold out much longer.”

“Who did he say it to?”

“Well, what I think is, he says it to everyone. I heard him myself, telling his geologists never to part with their weapons. In case they’re needed. Got a cigarette about you, Andrei Mikhailovich?”

“No,” said Andrei. “And what about the sergeant?”

“There’s no getting close to the sergeant. With him you get off at the same stop you got on at. Hard as flint. They’ll kill him first. They really hate him.”

“All right,” said Andrei. “But what about the Korean, after all? Is he working on the soldiers or not?”

“I haven’t seen him doing that. He always keeps himself to himself. If you like, I can keep a special eye on him, but I reckon it’s a waste of time…”

“Right, here’s the story,” said Andrei. “Starting tomorrow there’s a long halt. Basically, there’s no work to be done. Except on the tractor. And the soldiers will just be loitering about and shooting the bull. So what you have to do, Permyak, is figure out for me who’s running this show. That’s your top priority. Think of some way; you know better than I do how it can be done…” He got up, and Permyak jumped to his feet too. “Did you really vomit today?”

“Yeah, I got it real bad… Seems like it’s eased off a bit now.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Nah, it’s not worth the bother. But I could use some smokes.”

“OK. You get the tractor fixed and I’ll give you a bonus. Off you go.”

Permyak slipped out through the door past the Mute, who moved aside for him. Andrei walked across to the window and leaned on the windowsill, waiting the regulation five minutes. The beam of the swiveling headlamp picked out the black, bulky forms of the cargo sleds and the second tractor and set the remaining shards of glass glittering in the windows of the house opposite. To the right the metal heel plates on the boots of an invisible sentry clinked as he wandered back and forth across the street, quietly whistling some mournful tune or other.

Never mind, Andrei thought. We’ll survive. If I could just find the ringleader… He pictured it to himself again—the sergeant lines up the unarmed men in a single rank on Andrei’s order and he, the leader of the expedition, slowly walks along the rank, holding a pistol in his lowered hand and glancing into the stony faces overgrown with stubble, and he stops at Hnoipek, right in front of that red-haired scumbag’s face, and shoots him in the stomach—first one shot, and then another… without charge or trial. “And that’s what will happen to every cowardly rat who dares to…”

And it seems that Mr. Pak really doesn’t have anything to do with this business, he thought. That’s something, at least. Nothing will happen tomorrow. Nothing will happen for another three days, and three days is long enough to come up with all sorts of things… For instance, we could find a good spring a hundred kilometers farther on. No doubt they’ll gallop on like horses to get to water. This sweltering heat is unbearable… We’ve only been here one night and the whole place already stinks of shit… And anyway, time is always on the side of the bosses against the troublemakers. It’s always been that way, everywhere… Where did I get that from? Izya. No, I probably made it up myself. It’s a good thought, a correct thought. Attaboy… So today they conspired and decided they won’t move on tomorrow. They’ll get up sizzling in the morning and we’ll hand them a long halt. No need to go anywhere after all, guys, it was a waste of time showing your teeth… And here’s some rice porridge with prunes for you, a second mug of tea, and chocolate… So take that, Mr. Hnoipek! But I’ll get around to you, just give me time… Dammit, I’m so sleepy… You just forget about drinking anything, Mr. Counselor, you need to sleep. Tomorrow at first light… Damn you to hell, Fritz, you and your expansion plans. The emperor of all shit, that’s you…

“Let’s go,” he said to the Mute.

Izya was still thumbing through his papers. He’d developed a new bad habit now—biting his beard. He collected a handful of the matted hair, stuck it in between his teeth, and gnawed on it. What a booby, honestly… Andrei walked over to his camp bed and started spreading out the sheet. It stuck to his hands like oilcloth.

Izya suddenly turned right around toward him and said, “So, the story is that they lived here under the rule of the Kindest and Simplest. Both words with capital letters, note. They had a good life, plenty of everything. Then the climate started changing and temperatures fell sharply. And then something else happened and they all died. I found a diary here. The man who wrote it barricaded himself in his apartment and starved to death. Or rather, he hanged himself—after he went insane… It all started when this sort of shimmering appeared outside…”

“When what appeared?” Andrei asked, and stopped tugging off his shoe.

“Some kind of shimmering appeared. Shimmering! And if anyone got caught in that shimmering, they disappeared. Sometimes they managed to shout out, but sometimes they didn’t even have time for that; they simply dissolved into thin air—and that was it.”

“Crazy bullshit…” Andrei growled. “Well?”

“Anyone who went out of the house died in that shimmering. But at first the ones who got frightened and realized they were in really deep shit stayed alive. At first they talked to each other on the phone, and then they gradually started dying off. After all, they had nothing to eat, it was freezing outside, and they hadn’t laid in any firewood, the heating wasn’t working…”

“And where did the shimmering go to?”

“He doesn’t write anything about that. I told you, he lost his mind at the end. The last entry he made is this…” Izya rustled the papers. “Here, listen: ‘I can’t go on. There’s no point anyway. It’s time. This morning the Kindest and Simplest walked along the street and glanced in at my window. It’s the smile. It’s time.’ That’s all. And note that his apartment is on the fifth floor. The poor wretch hung a noose from the ceiling lamp… It’s still hanging there, by the way.”

“Yes, sounds like he really did go insane,” said Andrei, getting into bed. “That’s the starvation, for sure. Listen, what about water, is there anything?”

“Nothing so far. Tomorrow, I think, we ought to walk to the end of the aqueduct… What’s this, going to bed already?”

“Yes, and I recommend you do the same,” said Andrei. “Turn down the lamp and clear out.”

“Ah, listen,” Izya said plaintively. “I wanted to read for a bit longer. You’ve got a good lamp here.”

“And where’s yours? You’ve got one just like it.”

“You know, it got broken. In the sled… I stood a crate on it. By accident…”

“You cretin,” said Andrei. “All right, take the lamp and leave.”

Izya hastily rustled his papers and moved out his chair, then he said, “Ah yes! Duggan brought your pistol back. And he passed on a message from the colonel for you, but I’ve forgotten…”

“OK, let me have the pistol,” Andrei said. He stuck the pistol under his pillow and turned over onto his side, with his back toward Izya.

“How about I read you a letter?” Izya asked in a cajoling voice.

“Get out,” Andrei said calmly.

Izya giggled. Lying with his eyes closed, Andrei heard the rustling as he bustled about, gathering up his papers, and the creaking of the dried-out parquet. Then the door squeaked, and when Andrei opened his eyes, it was already dark.

Some kind of shimmering… Mmm, yes. Well, we’ll have to see how it goes. There’s nothing we can do about that. We have to think about the things we can control… There wasn’t any shimmering in Leningrad, there was bitter, atrocious, hideous, freezing cold, and people who were freezing to death cried out in the icy entranceways—hour after hour, getting weaker all the time… He used to fall asleep listening to someone calling out, and wake up to the same hopeless call, and he couldn’t have said it was frightening; it was more sickening, and in the morning, when he walked down the stairs that were flooded with frozen shit, muffled right up to his eyes, to get water, holding his mother’s hand, the one that was pulling the little sled with a bucket lashed to it, that person who had been calling out was lying down at the bottom, beside the elevator shaft, probably still where he fell the day before, it had to be the same spot—he couldn’t get up or even crawl, and absolutely no one had come out to him… And no shimmering was needed. We only survived because my mother was in the habit of ordering firewood in the early spring instead of in summer. The firewood saved us. Twelve adult cats and a little kitten that was so hungry, when I tried to stroke it, it pounced on my hand and started greedily chewing and biting my fingers. I’d like to send you there, you bastards, Andrei thought about the soldiers with sudden malice. That was no Experiment… And that city was more terrible than this one. I would definitely have gone insane. What saved me was being so young. The little children simply died…

And they didn’t surrender the city after all, he thought. Those who stayed gradually died off. They stacked them in the woodsheds and tried to get the living out—the authorities were still in control and life carried on—a strange, delirious life. Some people just died quietly, some committed acts of heroism, and then they died too… Some slaved in a factory to the bitter end, and when the time came, they died too… Some grew fat on all this, buying valuables, gold, pearls, and earrings for scraps of bread, and then they died too—they took them down to the Neva and shot them, then walked back up, not looking at anyone, slinging their rifles on their flat backs… Some hunted with axes in the side streets and ate human flesh and even tried to trade in it, but they died too anyway… In that city nothing was more ordinary than death. But the authorities still functioned, and while the authorities functioned, the city stood.

I wonder, did they feel sorry for us at all? Or did they simply not think about us? Did they just carry out orders, and the orders were about the city, with nothing about us? That is, there was something about us, of course, but only under point “P for Population”… At the Finland Station, trains of suburban-line railroad cars stood under a clear sky that was white from the cold. In our car there were lots of kids just like me, about twelve years old—some sort of orphanage. I remember almost nothing. I remember the sun in the windows, and the steam of people’s breath, and a child’s voice that kept repeating the same phrase over and over, with the same helpless, squealing intonation: “You fuck off out of here!” And then again: “You fuck off out of here!” And again…

Wait, that’s not what I was thinking about. Orders and compassion—that was it. Take me, for instance: I feel sorry for the soldiers. I understand them very well and even sympathize with them. We selected volunteers, and above all else, of course, the volunteers were adventurers, hotheads itching for action, who were bored to tears in our well-run City and fancied the idea of seeing somewhere completely new, getting to play with an automatic rifle when they got the chance, looting ruins, and then when they came home, stuffing their pockets with bonus money, tacking new stripes on their uniforms, and strutting their stuff with the girls… And instead of that… they get diarrhea, bloody blisters, and spooky crap… Anyone would mutiny!

But what about me? Is it any easier for me? Did I come here for the diarrhea? I don’t want to go on either, I don’t see anything good up ahead either, and I had hopes of my own, too, dammit! My very own Crystal Palace just over the horizon! Maybe I’d only be too glad right now to give the order: That’s it, guys, pack up and turn back! I’m sick and tired of all this filth too, aren’t I? I’m afraid too, dammit—of that shimmering, or those people with iron heads. Maybe the sight of those people with no tongues froze my insides solid: there it is, a warning—don’t go that way, you fool, go back… And the wolves? When I was alone in the rear guard—because you were all so afraid you crapped your pants—do you think I enjoyed walking back there? They can just come darting out of the dust, rip off half your ass, and disappear… So there you have it, my dear friends, my dear bastards: you’re not the only ones having it tough; I’m all dried out and cracked inside from thirst too.

So OK, he told himself. Then what the hell are you going on for? Just give the order tomorrow, we’ll flap our wings and fly, and in a month we’ll be home, and we’ll dump the high authority delegated to us at Heiger’s feet: right, fuck you, brother, go and do it yourself, if you’re so eager to press on with this expansion, if you’ve got an itch up the you-know-where… Ah, no, why necessarily make a big scandal out of it? After all, we’ve covered nine hundred kilometers, made a map, collected ten crates of archives—isn’t that enough? There isn’t anything up ahead! How much longer can we go on grinding down our feet? This isn’t Earth, it’s not a sphere… There isn’t any oil here, there isn’t any water, there aren’t any large settlements… And there isn’t any Anticity—of course not, that’s absolutely clear now; no one here has ever even heard of it… Anyway, the excuses can be found. Excuses… That’s just it. They’re excuses!

Exactly how do things stand here? The agreement was to go all the way, and you were ordered to go all the way. Right? Right. And now: Can you go on? I can. We have chow. We have fuel, the guns are in good order… Of course, the men are bushed, but they’re all unscathed, none of them are hurt… And when all’s said and done, they’re not so badly exhausted, if they can monkey around with Skank all evening. No, brother, your argument doesn’t hold water. You’re a crappy boss, that’s what Heiger will tell you. I was mistaken about you, he’ll say. And he’s got Quejada whispering in one ear and Permyak in the other, and Ellisauer standing by in reserve…

Andrei tried to drive this last thought out of his head as quickly as possible, but it was already too late. He realized with a shudder that his status as “Mr. Counselor” was in fact very important to him, and he found it very painful to think that this status might suddenly change.

Well, let it change, he thought defensively. Am I going to starve to death without that position? By all means, let Mr. Quejada take my place, and I’ll take his. What harm will that do to the cause? My God, he suddenly thought. What cause is that, anyway? What are you driveling about, friend? You’re not a little kid any longer, taking responsibility for the fate of the world. You know, the fate of the world will get by without you, and without Heiger… Everyone must do his own duty at his own post? By all means, I don’t object to that. I’m willing to do my own duty at my own post. At my own. At this one. Wielding power. And there you have it, Mr. Counselor! What the hell! What gives a former noncommissioned office of a defeated army the right to rule a city of a million people, and here I am, within spitting distance of a doctorate, a man with a university education, a Komsomol member, and I don’t have the right to run a science department? What’s wrong here? Do I get worse results than he does? What’s the problem?

This is all garbage—I have the right; I don’t have the right… The right to power belongs to whoever holds the power. Or more precisely, if you like, the right to power is held by whoever exercises power. If you know how to bend people to your will, you have the right to power. And if you don’t—sorry!

And you will go on when I tell you to, you motherfuckers! he thought, addressing the sleeping expedition. And you’ll go on when I tell you to not because I’m desperate to push on into uncharted territory like that bearded baboon; you’ll go on when I tell you to because I order you to go on. And I’ll order you to go on, you sons of bitches, you slobs, you shit-assed soldiers of fortune, not out of any sense of duty to Heiger—perish the thought—but because I have power, and I have to constantly affirm that power—affirm it to you, you dumb assholes, and affirm it to myself. And to Heiger… To you—because otherwise you’ll devour me. To Heiger—because otherwise he’ll sack me, and he’ll be right. And to myself… You know, the kings and all the monarch types used to have this hocus-pocus formula: their power was given to them by God in person; they couldn’t even imagine themselves without power, and neither could their subjects. And even so, they still had to keep their wits about them. But we little people don’t believe in God. No one has anointed us to the throne. We have to take care of ourselves. Fortune favors the brave—that’s the way it is with us. We don’t need any imposters; I’m the one who’s going to command. Not you, not him, not those guys, and not those dames. Me. The army will support me…

What a heap of baloney, he thought, even feeling a bit embarrassed. He turned over onto his other side, pushing his hand in under the pillow, where it was a bit cooler, to make himself more comfortable. His fingers ran into the pistol…

So how do you intend to implement your program of action, Mr. Counselor? You’ll have to shoot! Not just imagine yourself shooting (“Private Hnoipek, step out of the ranks!”), not just engage in mental masturbation, but do it—go ahead and shoot a live human being, a man who might be unarmed, not even suspecting anything, maybe not even guilty when all’s said and done… but to hell with all that! A live human being—shoot him in the stomach, the soft belly, the guts… No, I don’t know how do that, I’ve never done that, and God help me, I can’t even imagine it… Of course, in the skirmish at 340 kilometers, I fired like everyone else, simply out of fright, I didn’t understand anything… But I couldn’t see anyone there, and they were firing at me too, dammit!

OK, he thought. All right, then—so I’m some kind of humanist, and then again, I’m not accustomed to it… But then, what if they won’t go on? I order them to and they answer, you can fuck off, brother, go yourself, if you’ve got an itch up the you-know-where…

Now there’s an idea! he thought. Issue the slobs a small amount of water, allocate them some of the food for the journey back, and let them fix the broken tractor… Off you go, we’ll get by without you. Now, wouldn’t that be great, to just dump all that shit in a single stroke! But then he immediately imagined the colonel’s face if he heard a proposal like that. Mmm, yes, the colonel won’t understand. He’s the wrong breed. He’s precisely one of those… those monarchs. The idea of possible insubordination doesn’t even enter his head. And in any case, he won’t agonize over all these problems… Aristocratic, military blood. It’s fine for him—his father was a colonel, and his grandfather was a colonel, and his great-grandfather was a colonel; just look what an empire they built up, and no doubt they killed plenty of people in the process… So let him shoot them, if need be. After all, they’re his men, and I’ve got no intention of interfering in his business… Dammit, I’m sick of all this. Gutless intelligentsia whining, it’s turned my brains to mush! They must go—and that’s the end of it! I’m carrying out my orders, so you carry out yours, all right? I won’t get any thanks for disobeying, and it won’t be good for your health either, damn and blast you! That’s all. To hell with it. I’d be better off thinking about women than this hogwash. Some philosophy of power this is…

He turned over again, twisting up the sheet under him, and strained to picture Selma in that lilac negligee of hers, bending over in front of the bed and putting down the tray of coffee on the little table… He imagined all the details of how it would be with Selma, then suddenly—without any strain this time—he was in his office, where he found Amalia in the big armchair, with her little skirt rolled right up to her armpits… Then he realized things had gone too far.

He flung off the sheet and deliberately sat in an uncomfortable position, with the edge of the camp bed cutting into his backside, staring at the rectangle of the window, filled with a diffuse light. Then he looked at his watch. It was already after midnight. If I get up now, he thought, and I go down to the ground-floor level… Where is she sacked out down there—in the kitchen? This idea always used to provoke a response of healthy disgust, but this time that didn’t happen. He imagined Skank’s naked, dirty legs, but he didn’t dwell on them, he moved higher… He suddenly felt curious about what she was like naked. After all, a woman’s a woman.

“My God!” he said in a loud voice.

The door immediately creaked and the Mute appeared. A black shadow in the darkness, with only the whites of his eyes gleaming.

“Well, what are you doing here?” Andrei asked dejectedly. “Go and sleep.”

The Mute disappeared. Andrei yawned uneasily and slumped sideways onto the camp bed.

He woke in horror, soaking wet.

“Halt, who goes there?” the sentry howled again under his window. His voice was high-pitched and desperate, as if he were calling for help.

And immediately Andrei heard heavy, crunching blows, as if someone huge were regularly and repeatedly hammering on crumbling stone with a huge sledgehammer.

“I’ll fire!” the sentry squealed in a voice that didn’t even sound human, and started shooting.

Andrei couldn’t remember how he got to the window. In the darkness to his right he saw the fitful orange flashes of shots. The fiery flickering outlined the form of something black, massive, and unmoving farther up the street, with showers of green sparks flying out of it. Andrei didn’t have time to understand anything. The sentry’s ammunition clip ran out, and for a brief moment there was silence, then he squealed again out there in the darkness—exactly like a horse—and his boots started thudding, and suddenly he was there, in the circle of light under the window, waving his empty automatic and still squealing. He dashed to a tractor and cowered in the black shadow behind the caterpillar track, repeatedly tugging on his spare ammunition clip, trying to jerk it out from behind his belt, but he couldn’t… And then those crunching blows of a sledgehammer on stone started up again: boooom, boooom…

When Andrei darted out into the street without his trousers, with his shoelaces dangling free and his pistol in his hand, a lot of men were already there. Sergeant Vogel was roaring like a bull: “Tevosyan, Hnoipek! To the right! Prepare to fire! Anastasis! Onto the tractor, behind the cabin! Observe, prepare to fire! Move it! You lily-livered pigs… Vasilenko! To the left! Lie down, and—To the left, you Slavic bonehead! Get down and observe! Palotti! Where are you going, you greasy wop!”

He grabbed the aimlessly running Italian by the collar, gave him a ferocious kick on the backside, and flung him in the direction of the tractor.

“Behind the cabin, you animal! Anastasis, shine the light along the street!”

Men were jostling Andrei in the back and from the sides. He gritted his teeth and tried to stay on his feet, not understanding anything, fighting an overpowering urge to yell out something nonsensical. He pressed himself up against the wall, holding his pistol out in front of him and looking around like an animal at bay. Why are they all running that way? What if there’s an attack from the rear? Or from the roof? Or from the houses across the street?

“Drivers!” Vogel roared. “Drivers, onto the tractors. Who’s that firing there, you bastards? Cease fire!”

Gradually Andrei’s head cleared. Things turned out not to be so bad after all. The men had taken cover where they were ordered to, the scurrying about was over, and at last someone on the tractor turned the searchlight to light up the street.

“There he is!” a strangled voice shouted.

Automatic rifles barked briefly and then fell silent. Andrei only had time to spot something huge, almost higher than the houses, something ugly, with stumps and spikes jutting out in different directions. It cast an endless shadow along the street and immediately turned the corner two blocks away. It disappeared from sight, and the heavy blows of a sledgehammer on crunching stone became quieter, then even quieter, and soon completely faded away.

“What happened there, Sergeant?” the colonel’s calm voice asked above Andrei’s head.

The colonel, with all his buttons fastened, was standing at his window, leaning his hands on the windowsill. “The sentry raised the alarm, Colonel,” Sergeant Vogel replied. “Private Terman.”

“Private Terman, report to me!” said the colonel.

The soldiers started turning their heads, looking around.

“Private Terman!” the sergeant barked. “Report to the colonel!”

In the diffused light of the headlamp, they saw Private Terman frantically scrambling out from behind the caterpillar track. Some piece of the poor devil’s gear got snagged again. He yanked on it with all his might, got to his feet, and shouted in a squeaky voice: “Private Terman reporting on the colonel’s orders!”

“What a scarecrow!” the colonel said fastidiously. “Fasten yourself up, man.”

And at that moment the sun came on. It was so sudden that a chorus of muffled, incoherent exclamations ran through the camp. Many of the men put their hands over their eyes. Andrei squeezed his eyes shut.

“Why did you raise the alarm, Private Terman?”

“An intruder, Colonel,” Terman blurted out with a note of despair in his voice. “He failed to respond when challenged. He was coming directly at me. The ground was shaking! In accordance with regulations, I challenged him twice, then opened fire.”

“Well now,” said the colonel. “I commend you.”

In the bright light everything seemed completely different from five minutes ago. The camp looked like a camp now—weary, worn-out sleds, dirty metal barrels of fuel, tractors covered in dust. Against this ordinary, drearily familiar background, the half-dressed armed men, lying and squatting down with their machine guns and automatic rifles, with mussed hair, creased faces, and disheveled beards, looked absurd and ludicrous. Andrei remembered that he wasn’t wearing any trousers and his shoelaces were dangling loose, and he suddenly felt embarrassed. He cautiously backed away toward the door, but a crowd of drivers, cartographers, and geologists was standing there.

“I beg to report,” Terman was saying in the meantime, having perked up a bit, “that it was not human, Colonel.”

“Then what was it?”

Private Terman was lost for words.

“It was more like an elephant, Colonel,” Vogel said authoritatively. “Or some kind of antediluvian monster.”

“It was like a stegosaurus more than anything,” Tevosyan put in.

The colonel immediately turned his gaze on Tevosyan and examined him curiously for a few seconds. “Sergeant,” he said at last. “Why do your men open their mouths without permission?”

Someone giggled spitefully.

“Silence in the ranks! Permission to punish him, Colonel?”

“I consider—” the colonel began, and at that point he was interrupted.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaa…” someone started whimpering quietly at first, then wailing louder and louder, and Andrei started rapidly glancing around the camp, trying to see who was making that noise and why.

Everyone began shifting about in alarm, turning their heads to and fro, and then Andrei saw Anastasis, whiter than a sheet, almost green, jabbing his hand at something up ahead of him, unable to say a single intelligible word. Gathering his nerve, ready for anything at all, Andrei looked where the man was pointing, but couldn’t see anything there. The street was empty and the heat haze was already shimmering at the far end of it. Then the sergeant suddenly cleared his throat with a hollow sound and tugged his cap down over his forehead, and someone swore in a quiet, desperate voice, but Andrei still didn’t understand, and it was only when an unfamiliar voice wheezed “God save us!” right in his ear that he finally understood. The hairs on the back of his neck started rising and his legs went weak.

The statue on the corner was gone. The huge man of iron with the face like a toad and the theatrically outstretched arms had disappeared. There was nothing left at the intersection but the heaps of dried-out crap that the soldiers had dumped around the statue the day before.

3

“I’ll be going, then, Colonel,” Andrei said, getting up.

The colonel also got up, and immediately leaned heavily on his cane. Today he was even paler, his face was drawn, and he seemed like a genuinely old man. Nothing left, not even his bearing, you could say… “A safe journey to you, Mr. Counselor,” said the colonel. His faded eyes had an almost guilty look. “Damn it all, commander’s reconnaissance is basically my job…”

Andrei picked up his automatic off the table and hooked the strap over his shoulder. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “For instance, I have the feeling I’m running off and dumping everything on you. And you’re not well, Colonel.”

“Yes, just imagine, today I…” the colonel began and then stopped short. “I suppose you’ll be back before dark?”

“I’ll be back quite a bit earlier than that,” said Andrei. “I don’t even regard this sortie as reconnaissance. I simply want to show these cowardly bastards that there’s nothing terrible up ahead. Walking statues, my eye!” Then he realized what he’d said. “That wasn’t intended as a reproach to your men, Colonel…”

“Think nothing of it,” said the colonel, gesturing feebly with his gaunt hand. “You’re perfectly right. Soldiers are always cowardly. I’ve never seen any brave soldiers in my life. And why on Earth should they be brave?”

“Well,” Andrei said with a smile, “if there were merely enemy tanks waiting for us up ahead…”

“Tanks!” said the colonel. “Tanks are a different matter. But I remember very clearly one incident when a squadron of paratroopers refused to advance into a village that was home to a sorcerer famous for miles around.”

Andrei laughed and held out his hand to the colonel. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

“Just a moment,” said the colonel, stopping him. “Duggan!”

Duggan was instantly there in the room, holding a flask sheathed in silver grillwork. A little silver tray appeared on the table, with little silver shot glasses on it.

“Be my guest,” said the colonel.

They drank and shook hands. “I’ll see you later,” Andrei repeated.

He walked down the stinking stairway into the lobby, nodded coolly to Quejada, who was fiddling with some theodolite-like instrument right there on the floor, and went out into the red-hot street. When his short shadow fell across the cracked slabs of the sidewalk, a second shadow immediately sprang up beside it, and then Andrei remembered about the Mute. He looked around. The Mute was standing in his usual pose, with his open hands stuck into the belt on which his terrifying machete hung. His thick black hair was standing up on end, his bare feet were planted wide apart, and his brown skin gleamed as if it had been smeared with grease.

“Maybe you’ll take an automatic after all?” Andrei asked.

No.

“Well, please yourself.”

Andrei looked around. Izya and Pak were sitting in the shade of a trailer with a map spread out in front of them, studying the layout of the City. Two soldiers were craning their necks and glancing over their heads. One of the soldiers caught Andrei’s eye, hastily looked away, and nudged the other in the side. They both immediately walked off, disappearing behind the sled.

The drivers were jostling around the second tractor under Ellisauer’s supervision. They were dressed in various odds and ends, and Ellisauer was sporting a gigantic, wide-brimmed hat. Two soldiers were hanging about close beside them, giving advice and frequently spitting off to the side.

Andrei looked up along the line of the street. Nothing there. Scorching hot air shimmering above the cobblestones. Heat haze. A hundred meters away it was impossible to make out anything—like being underwater.

“Izya!” he called.

Izya and Pak looked around and got to their feet. The Korean picked up his small, handmade automatic rifle off the road and tucked it under his arm. “Already time, is it?” Izya asked briskly.

Andrei nodded and walked on.

Everyone looked at him: Permyak, screwing his eyes up against the sun; feeble-minded Ungern, with his permanently slack mouth rounded into a circle of alarm; the morose gorilla Jackson, slowly wiping his hands on a piece of fiber packing… Ellisauer, looking just like a ragged, dirty wooden-mushroom shelter from a children’s play area in Leningrad, set two fingers to the brim of his hat with a supremely solemn air of commiseration, and the spitting soldiers stopped spitting, exchanged inaudible remarks through their teeth, and drifted off together through the dust. Run scared, you yellow bastards, Andrei thought vindictively. If I called you now, just as a joke, you’d crap in your pants…

They walked past the sentry, who performed a hasty “present arms,” and then they strode off across the cobblestones—Andrei in front with his automatic over his shoulder, and the Mute hard on his heels with a rucksack containing four cans of food, a pack of hardtack, and two flasks of water, while Izya plodded along about ten steps behind in his battered shoes, carrying an empty rucksack over his shoulder; he was holding the map in one hand and feverishly patting at his pockets with the other, as if checking to see to if he had forgotten anything. At the back, striding along easily with the slightly waddling gait of a man used to long-distance marches, came Pak, his short-barreled automatic under his arm.

The street was scorching hot and the ferocious sun roasted their shoulder blades and the tops of their shoulders. They were deluged by surges of heat from the walls of the houses. There was no wind at all today.

In the camp behind them the wrecked motor was started up—Andrei didn’t even look back. He was suddenly engulfed by a sense of liberation. For a few glorious hours the soldiers, with their stink and their inscrutably simplistic minds, were disappearing from his life. And Quejada was disappearing too, that schemer who was so totally transparent, which made Andrei loathe him all the more; all those loathsome problems with other people’s sore feet were disappearing too, all the problems with someone else’s squabbles and fights, with someone else’s puking (could it be poisoning?) and someone else’s blood-saturated diarrhea (could it be dysentery?). To hell with all of you, Andrei euphorically repeated over and over. I never want to see you again. It feels so good without you!

Of course, he immediately recalled the dubious Korean Pak, and for a moment it felt as if the bright joy of liberation had been clouded with new anxieties and suspicions, but he instantly dismissed the idea without a second thought. Just a Korean. Calm and impassive, he never complains about anything. A Far East version of Izya Katzman, that’s all. He suddenly recalled something his brother once told him—that all the peoples of the Far East, especially the Japanese, felt exactly the same way about the Koreans as all the peoples of Europe, especially the Russians and Germans, felt about the Jews. Just at this moment he found that amusing, and for some reason he suddenly remembered Kensi… Yes, if only Kensi were here, and Uncle Yura, and Donald… Agh… If only he had managed to persuade Uncle Yura to join this expedition, everything would be very different now.

He recalled how, a week before he left, he had carved out a few hours, taken Heiger’s limousine with the bulletproof windows, and hit the road to Uncle Yura’s place. And what a time they had, drinking together in the large village house that was clean and bright, with a delicious scent of mint, smoke from the hearth, and freshly baked bread. They drank moonshine, snacked on piglet in aspic and crunchy home pickles of a kind that Andrei hadn’t eaten in God only knew how long, they gnawed on lamb ribs, dipping the pieces in a sauce suffused with the scent of garlic, and then Uncle Yura’s wife, Marthe, a buxom Dutch woman, who was pregnant for the third time already, brought in a whistling samovar that Uncle Yura had bought for a cartload of grain and a cartload of potatoes, and they spent a long time staunchly and substantially drinking tea with some amazing kind of jam—they sweated and panted, wiped their wet faces with embroidered towels, and Uncle Yura kept mumbling, “Things are fine, guys, life’s pretty tolerable now. Every day they march five parasites from the camp over here to me, I reeducate them with labor, and I don’t spare the effort, you know… If need be, I just poke them in the teeth, but they stuff their bellies full here, they eat the same as I do, I’m not some kind of blood-sucking exploiter…” And when they were saying good-bye, as Andrei was already getting into the car, Uncle Yura squeezed Andrei’s hand in his huge paws that seemed to have turned into two great callouses and tried to catch Andrei’s eyes as he said, “You’ll forgive me, Andrei, I know you will… I’d abandon everything, I’d abandon my woman… But I can’t abandon those guys—that’s something I can’t allow myself to do,” and he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb in the direction of two white-haired little boys with no more than a year between them, who were pummeling away at each other behind the porch—but quietly, so that no one would hear…

Andrei looked back. He couldn’t see the camp anymore; the heat haze had hidden it. The stuttering of the motor only faintly reached him—as if it were coming through cotton wool. Izya was walking alongside Pak, waving the map under his nose and shouting something about scale. Pak wasn’t actually arguing. He just smiled, and when Izya tried to stop, in order to unfold the map and demonstrate what he was thinking, Pak delicately took him by the elbow and led him on. A serious man, no doubt about it. Other things being equal, he could definitely be relied on. I wonder what his beef is with Heiger? They’re completely different people, that much at least is clear…

Pak had studied at Cambridge and he had a PhD. On returning to South Korea, he took part in some kind of student protests against the regime, and Syngman Rhee clapped him in jail. He was released by the Korean army in 1950, and the newspapers wrote about him as a genuine son of the Korean people, who hated Syngman Rhee’s clique and the American imperialists. He became a deputy president of the university, and a month later he was clapped in jail again, where he was held without any charges being brought until the landing at Chemulpo, when the jail came under fire from the First Cavalry Division, which was pushing hard toward the northeast. Seoul was sheer hell on Earth, and Pak didn’t expect to survive—and then he was offered the chance to participate in the Experiment.

He had arrived in the City a long time before Andrei, run through twenty different professions, and of course found himself in conflict with the mayor and joined an underground organization of intellectuals that supported Heiger at the time. Something happened between him and Heiger. For some reason or other, the large group of underground oppositionists left the City two years before the Turning Point and moved away to the north. They were lucky: 350 kilometers from the City they discovered a “time capsule” in the ruins—a huge metal tank, packed to overflowing with all sorts of cultural artifacts and examples of technology. It was a good spot, with water and fertile soil, right beside the Wall—so they settled there.

They knew nothing about what had happened in the City, and when the expedition’s armor-plated tractors arrived, they thought they had come for them. Fortunately only one man was killed in the furious, brief, and absurd skirmish. Pak recognized Izya, an old friend of his, and realized the fighting was a mistake… And afterward he asked to join up with Andrei. He said that his motivation was curiosity, that he had been planning a trek to the north for a long time but the emigrants didn’t have the resources for it. Andrei didn’t entirely trust him, but he took him along. He thought Pak’s knowledge would come in handy, and Pak really had been useful to him. He had assisted the expedition in every way he could and had always been friendly and obliging with Andrei—and even more so with Izya, his old friend—but it was impossible to get him to speak frankly. Not even Izya, let alone Andrei, could discover where Pak had obtained so much mythical and real-world information about the road ahead, why he had tagged along with the expedition, and what he thought in general—about Heiger, about the City, about the Experiment… Pak never made conversation on abstract subjects.

Andrei stopped, waited for his rear guard to catch up, and asked, “Well, have you agreed what exactly we’re interested in?”

“What exactly?” said Izya, finally unfolding his map. “Look…” and he started pointing with his black-edged fingernail. “Right now, we’re here. That means… one, two… in six city blocks there should be a square. There’s a big building of some kind there, probably something to do with government. We definitely have to get in there. Well, and if something interesting turns up along the way… Ah yes! It would be interesting to get here too. It’s quite a long way, but the scale here’s not worth a damn, so we can’t tell—maybe it’s all pretty close… See, it says ‘Pantheon.’ I just love pantheons.”

“Well now…” said Andrei, adjusting his automatic. “We can do it like that, of course… So we’re not going to look for water today, then?”

“It’s a long way to water,” Pak said in a low voice.

“Yes, brother,” Izya put in. “The water’s a long way off… See what they show here—a water tower… Is it here?” he asked Pak.

Pak shrugged. “I don’t know, but if there is any water left in this neighborhood, it can only be there.”

“Uh-huh,” Izya drawled. “It’s a pretty long way, about thirty kilometers; we can’t get there and back in one day… Of course, there’s the scale… Listen, why do you want water right now? We can go for the water tomorrow, the way we agreed… we’ll drive there, right?”

“All right,” said Andrei. “Let’s go.”

They walked side by side now, and no one said anything for a while. Izya kept twisting his head around and seemed to be sniffing at the air, but nothing of any interest turned up, either on the left or the right. Three- or four-story houses, sometimes rather beautiful. Broken-out window panes. Some windows boarded up with warped sheets of plywood, and half-ruined flower boxes on balconies. Lots of houses entwined in coarse, dusty ivy. A large store, with huge display windows that had somehow survived, too dusty to see through, although the doors had been smashed in… Izya darted away at a jog, glanced inside, and came back again.

“Empty,” he announced. “All smashed to hell.”

Some kind of public building—maybe a playhouse, maybe a concert hall, or maybe a movie theater. Then another store—with the display window cracked right across—and yet another store across the street… Izya suddenly stopped, drew his breath in noisily through his nose, and raised a dirty finger.

“Oh!” he said. “Here’s something!

“What?” asked Andrei, looking around.

“Paper,” Izya replied tersely.

Without looking at either of them, he made a confident beeline for a building on the right side of the street. It was an ordinary-looking building, not distinguished in any way from the others nearby, except perhaps by a slightly more sumptuous entrance and a certain Gothic accent detectable in its general style. Izya disappeared through the entrance, and before they could even get across the street, he stuck his head back out and called excitedly, “Come in here, Pak! A library!”

Andrei merely shook his head in admiration. Attaboy, Izya.

“A library?” said Pak, lengthening his stride. “Impossible!”

The vestibule was cool and dark after the searing yellow heat of the street. Tall Gothic windows, filled with stained glass, obviously overlooking an internal courtyard. A floor paved with decorative tiles. A double staircase of white stone leading upward to the left and the right… Izya was already running up to the left; Pak easily overtook him and they disappeared, striding up three steps at a time

“Why the hell do we want to trudge all the way up there?” Andrei asked the Mute.

The Mute agreed with him. Andrei looked for a place to sit down, and lowered himself onto the cool, white steps. He took off his automatic and put it down beside him. The Mute was already squatting down by the wall with his eyes closed and his long, powerful arms wrapped around his knees. It was quiet, with only an indistinct murmur of voices coming from upstairs.

I’m sick of this, Andrei thought impatiently. I’m sick of the dead city blocks. Of this silence. Of these riddles… If only we could find people, stay with them for a while, ask them a few questions… and if only they would feed us something… Anything at all, just not that gruesome oatmeal… and give us cool wine! Lots of it, as much as we want… or beer. His stomach started gurgling and he tensed up in fright, listening. No, it’s OK. Today I haven’t had to run even once—knock on wood, so far, so good! And it seems like my heel’s grown new skin…

Upstairs something tumbled over with a heavy, rumbling crash, and Izya yelled, articulating in a clear voice, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing, God almighty!” There was a laugh and the voices started murmuring again.

Rummage away, rummage away, Andrei thought to himself. You’re our only hope. You’re the only ones we can expect to come up with anything… And all that will come out of this wild goose chase will be my report and Izya’s twenty-four crates of documents!

He stretched out his legs and leaned back onto the steps, propping himself on his elbows. The Mute suddenly sneezed, and an echo replied clearly and brightly. Andrei threw back his head and started looking at the distant vaulted ceiling. They built well here, with style, better than us. And they obviously had a pretty good life too. But they still vanished anyway… Fritz won’t like all this at all—of course, he’d prefer a potential enemy. Or else what do we get? They lived here, they built here, they glorified some Heiger of their own… the Kindest and Simplest… And what’s the result? An empty void. As if no one had ever been here. Nothing but bones, and not very many of those for a population this large… So there you have it, Mr. President! Man proposes, but God sends down some mysterious shimmering. End of story.

He sneezed too and sniffed. It’s kind of cool in here… And it would be a good idea to have Quejada indicted when we get back… Andrei readily slipped into his habitual line of thought: how to pen Quejada into a corner so that he wouldn’t dare to open his mouth, how to make sure all the documentation was as clear as day and Heiger would immediately understand everything… But he put these thoughts aside—this was the wrong place and the wrong time. Right now he should only be thinking about tomorrow. And a bit of thinking about today wouldn’t do any harm. For instance, where did that statue go to, after all? Someone with horns on his head, some kind of stegosaur, came along, tucked it under his arm, and carried it away. What for? And it happens to weigh about fifty tons, by the way. If a beast like that wanted to, it could carry off a tractor under its arm. We’ve got to get away from here, that’s the point. If not for the colonel, we’d have pulled up stakes and moved out today… He started thinking about the colonel, and suddenly realized he was listening to something.

Some kind of vague, distant sound had appeared—not voices; the voices upstairs were still droning in the same way. No, out there in the street, outside the tall entrance doors standing ajar. The colored glass in the windows started audibly clinking and the stone steps under his elbows and backside started palpably vibrating, as if there were a railroad somewhere nearby and a train were rolling along it right now—a heavy freight train. The Mute suddenly opened his eyes wide and turned his head, listening warily.

Andrei cautiously pulled in his legs and got up, holding his automatic by the strap. The Mute immediately got up too, still listening and squinting sideways at Andrei with one eye.

Holding his weapon at the ready, Andrei silently ran to the doors and warily glanced out. The hot, dusty air scorched his face. The street was as yellow, scorching hot, and empty as before. Only the cotton-wool silence had disappeared. A huge, distant hammer was pounding on the road with dreary regularity, and the blows were clearly moving closer—heavy, crisp blows, crushing the cobblestones of the road into small fragments.

In the building across the street the cracked store window collapsed in a jangling shower of glass. Andrei started back in surprise, but immediately pulled himself together and drew back the bolt of his automatic, biting on his lip. Why the hell did I ever come here? some corner of his mind thought.

The hammer kept moving closer. It was absolutely impossible to tell which direction it was approaching from, but the blows grew heavier and heavier, crisper and crisper, and they had a strange, relentless ring to them, ineluctable and triumphal. The footsteps of fate, Andrei thought fleetingly. He looked around in confusion at the Mute.

He got a shock. The Mute was standing there, leaning his shoulder against the wall, focusing intently on trimming the nail on the little finger of his right hand with his machete. And he looked absolutely indifferent, even bored.

“What?” Andrei asked hoarsely. “What are you doing?”

The Mute looked at him, nodded, and went back to working on his fingernail. Boooom, boooom, boooom—the hammer blows were really close now; the ground under their feet was shaking. Then suddenly there was silence. Andrei glanced outside again. And he saw it: a dark figure standing at the nearest intersection, with its head towering up to third-floor level. A statue. An archaic metal statue. The same character he already knew, with the toadish face—only now he was standing there rigidly erect, with his heavy chin uplifted and one hand held behind his back, while the other was raised, with the index finger extended, either to threaten or to point to the sky…

Numb with fear, Andrei watched this monster as if he were having a bad dream. But he knew it was no nightmare. It was just a statue—an idiotic, mediocre contrivance of metal, covered in calx, or maybe ferriferous oxide, positioned grotesquely out of place. In the hot air rising from the road surface, its outlines trembled and wavered exactly like the outlines of the buildings along the street.

Andrei felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around—the Mute was smiling and nodding reassuringly at him. The boooom, boooom, boooom started up again outside. The Mute kept hold of his shoulder—fondling and caressing, kneading the muscles with affectionate fingers. Andrei pulled away sharply and glanced out again. The statue was gone. And once again there was silence.

Then Andrei pushed the Mute aside and ran up the stairs on numb legs, to where the voices were still droning in the same way, as if nothing at all had happened.

“That’s enough!” he barked as he tore into the library hall. “Let’s get out of here!”

His voice had turned completely hoarse, and they didn’t hear him, or maybe they heard him but took no notice because they were too absorbed. It was a huge space, receding into an unbelievable distance, and the shelves stacked with books muffled all sounds. One set of shelves had been knocked over and the books from it were lying in a heap. Izya and Pak were rummaging in this heap—both of them flushed and sweaty, excited and delighted… Andrei walked across to them, striding straight over the books, grabbed them both by the collar, and jerked them up onto their feet.

“We’re getting out of here,” he said. “That’s enough. Let’s go.”

Izya cast a bleary glance at him, jerked himself free, and immediately came to his senses. He ran a rapid glance over Andrei from head to foot.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Has something happened?”

“Nothing’s happened,” Andrei said angrily. “That’s enough digging around in here. Where did you want to go? The Pantheon? So let’s go to the Pantheon.”

Pak, whom Andrei was still clutching by the collar, delicately wriggled his shoulders and cleared his throat. Andrei let go of him.

“Do you know what we found here?” Izya began excitedly, then suddenly broke off. “Listen, what has happened?”

Andrei had already pulled himself together. Everything that occurred down below seemed absolutely ludicrous and impossible up here—in this austere, airless hall, under Izya’s searching gaze, and in the presence of the imperturbably correct Pak.

“We can’t waste so much time on every site,” he said with a frown. “We’ve only got one day. Let’s go.”

“A library isn’t just any other site!” Izya immediately objected. “This is the first library on our entire route… Listen, you look terrible. Come on, what really has happened?”

Andrei still couldn’t bring himself to tell them. He didn’t know how. “Let’s go,” he growled, turning away and striding back across the books toward the way out.

Izya overhauled him, took him by the arm, and walked along beside him. The Mute in the doorway stepped aside to let them pass. Andrei still didn’t know how to begin. All the possible beginnings and all the possible words were idiotic. Then he remembered about the diary.

“You were reading me a diary yesterday…” he said as they walked down the stairs. “You know, written by that guy who hanged himself…”

“Yes?”

“Yes, yes…”

Izya stopped. “The shimmering?”

“Did you really not hear anything?” Andrei asked despairingly.

Izya shook his beard from side to side, and Pak replied in a quiet voice. “We probably got carried away. We were arguing.”

“You maniacs…” said Andrei. He convulsively caught his breath, glanced around at the Mute, and finally said it. “The statue. It came and went… It seems they wander around the City, like they were alive…”

He lapsed into silence. “Well?” Izya asked impatiently.

“Well what? That’s it.”

Izya’s expression of intent interest changed to immense disappointment. “Well, so what?” he said. “So it’s a statue… another one walked last night, so what?”

Andrei opened his mouth and closed it again.

“The Ironheads,” Pak put in. “This is obviously where the legend came from.”

Unable to utter a word, Andrei glanced from Izya to Pak and back again. Izya rounded his lips in an sympathetic expression—the penny had finally dropped—and kept trying to pat Andrei on the arm, but Pak clearly didn’t think any further explanations were needed and furtively glanced back over his shoulder into the library.

“W-Well now…” Andrei finally managed to force out. “That’s just great. So you believed it straight off?”

“Listen, calm down, will you,” said Izya, grabbing hold of his sleeve. “Of course we believed it, why wouldn’t we? The Experiment is the Experiment, isn’t it? We lost sight of that, thanks to rampant diarrhea and our constant bickering, but the fact of the matter… Lord Almighty, what’s the big deal? So they’re statues, so they walk… But we’ve got a library here! And you know what a fascinating picture it paints? The people who lived here were our contemporaries—from the twentieth century…”

“I get it,” said Andrei. “Let go of my sleeve.”

It was obvious to him now that he’d made a total fool of himself. But then, these two still haven’t seen the statue for real. I reckon they’ll change their tune when they do. But then, the Mute acted kind of strange too… “Don’t even try to persuade me,” he said. “We haven’t got time for this library right now. When we drive by with the tractors, you can load up an entire sledful. But right now we’re leaving. I promised to get back in time for taps.”

“All right, then,” Izya said soothingly. “Right, let’s go. Let’s go.”

Shit, Andrei thought uneasily as he hurried down the stairs. How could I act that way? he asked himself as he opened the entrance door and walked out into the street first, so no one could see his face. And I’m not some common soldier or crude, ignorant driver, he thought, striding over the sizzling-hot cobblestones. It’s all down to Fritz, he thought furiously. He proclaimed that there was no Experiment anymore, and I believed it… that is, I didn’t really believe it, of course, I just accepted the new ideology—out of a sense of loyalty and sworn duty… Ah, no, guys, all these new ideologies are for fools, for the masses… But we lived for four years and never even spared a thought for the Experiment, didn’t we; we were up to our eyes in other business… Making our little career… he thought scathingly. Acquiring carpets and items for our private collections…

At the intersection he slowed down for a moment and cast an oblique glance into the side street. The statue was there, gesturing menacingly with a finger fifty centimeters long, repulsively grinning with its toadish mouth. As if to say, I’ll get you, you sons of bitches!

“Is this the one?” Izya casually asked.

Andrei nodded and moved on.

They walked on and on, gradually sinking into a stupor in the heat and the blinding light, stepping on their own short, ugly shadows, with the sweat drying into a salty crust on their foreheads and temples, and even Izya had stopped yakking about how some elegant hypotheses he had constructed had been demolished, and even the tireless Pak was already dragging one foot—the sole of his boot had torn off—and from time to time even the Mute opened his black, gaping mouth, stuck out his gruesome stump of his tongue, and started panting in double-quick time, like a dog… And nothing else happened, except that once Andrei lost his grip and shuddered when he happened to look up and saw a huge, green-stained face in a wide-open window on the fourth floor, staring at him with blind, bulging eyes. Well, after all, it was a ghastly sight—an ugly face with green blotches, filling the entire window up on the fourth floor.

Then they walked out into the square.

They hadn’t come across any squares like this before. It looked like some weird kind of forest had been felled here. The square was studded all over with plinths—round, square, hexagonal, stelliform, shaped like weird abstract hedgehogs, artillery towers, and mythical beasts, made of stone, cast iron, sandstone, marble, stainless steel, and even, apparently, gold… And all these plinths were empty, except for one fifty meters ahead of them, on which a leg as tall as a man, with an exceptionally muscly calf, had been snapped off above the knee, leaving the naked foot trampling the head of a winged lion.

The square was huge—they couldn’t see the far side of it through the murky heat haze—but on the right, at the very foot of the Yellow Wall, they could make out the form of a long, low building with a facade of closely spaced columns, distorted by the currents of hot air.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Andrei blurted out.

But Izya quoted something that Andrei didn’t recognize: “Sometimes he is bronze, and sometimes he is marble, sometimes he has a pipe, and sometimes he has no pipe…” and then he asked, “But where have they all gone to?”

No one answered. They all just gazed at this sight, as if they couldn’t get enough of it—even the Mute. Then Pak said, “Apparently we need to go over there…”

“Is that your Pantheon?” Andrei asked, for the sake of saying something, and Izya exclaimed in an indignant-sounding voice, “I don’t understand! What are they all doing, gadding about town? Then why didn’t we see then? There must be thousands of them here, thousands!”

“The City of a Thousand Statues,” said Pak.

Izya promptly swung around to face him. “You mean there’s a legend about that too?”

“No. But that’s what I would call it.”

“Hallelujah!” Andrei declared, struck by a sudden thought. “How are we going to get through here with our sleds? No explosives could possibly clear all these tank traps…”

“I think there must be a road around the square,” said Pak. “Along the Cliff.”

“Let’s go, shall we?” said Izya, already impatient to move on.

They set off directly toward the Pantheon, walking between the podia, over cobblestones that were smashed and crushed to small fragments, walking into the white dust that glittered brightly in the sunlight. Every now and then they stopped for a moment and either bent down or went up on tiptoe to read the inscriptions on the pediments, and the strangeness of the inscriptions was startling and confusing.

ON THE NINTH DAY A SMILE MAKES. THE BLESSING OF YOUR MUSCULUS GLUTEUS SAVED THESE LITTLE ONES. THE SUN SOARED UP AND THE DAWN OF LOVE WAS EXTINGUISHED. Or even simply, WHEN! Izya laughed and gurgled, slamming his fist into his palm. Pak smiled and swayed his head, but Andrei was embarrassed; he felt that this merriment was inappropriate, even indecent somehow, but his feelings were hard to pin down, and he just patiently tried to hurry them along. “Come on, that’s enough, that’s enough,” he repeated. “Let’s go. Come on, what the hell! We’re running late, it’ll be embarrassing…”

The sight of these idiots made him furious—what a time and place to choose to have fun and games! And they just kept on loitering and loitering, tediously wasting time, running their dirty fingers over the incised letters, cackling and clowning around, and he gave up on them and felt nothing but tremendous relief when he realized their voices had been left far behind and he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

It’s better like this, he thought delightedly. Without this retinue of fools. After all, they weren’t invited along, were they—I don’t remember that. They were mentioned, all right, but exactly what was it that was said? They were either asked to come in dress uniform, or on the contrary, they were asked not to come at all. Agh, what difference does it make now? Well, if it comes to that, they can wait down here for a while. Pak’s more or less OK, but Izya might suddenly start finding fault with my style and then, God forbid, he’ll get pushy and want to speak himself… No, no, it’s better without them, really. And the Mute? You stick behind me, here on the right, and keep your eyes peeled! You definitely can’t afford to daydream here. Don’t forget: we’re in the camp of serious adversaries here, nothing like Quejada or Hnoipek. Here, brother, take the automatic, I’ve got to have freedom of movement, and climbing up on the rostrum with an automatic—I’m not Heiger, thank God… And pardon me, but where’s my synopsis? A fine how d’you do this is! How can I manage without a synopsis?

The Pantheon towered up over him, a panoply of columns and broken, chipped steps, displaying their rusty reinforcing rods. He felt a cold draft from the columns—it was dark in there, where it smelled of anticipation and putrefaction, and the gigantic golden doors had already been flung open, and all he had to do was walk in. He strode from step to step, taking great care to make sure that he didn’t stumble—heaven forbid!—and end up sprawled out here, where everyone could see, and he kept groping at his pockets, but of course the synopsis wasn’t there, because of course, it had been left behind in the metal box… no, in the new suit, I was going to wear the new suit, wasn’t I, then I decided this would make a more dramatic impact…

Damn it all, how am I going to manage without a synopsis? he thought as he stepped into the dark vestibule. But just what did it say in the synopsis? he thought, cautiously placing his feet as he walked across a slippery floor of black marble. Greatness came first, he recalled with an intense effort, feeling the icy cold creeping in under his shirt. It was very cold in here, in this vestibule, they could have warned him, after all, it was summer outside, and by the way, they could have sprinkled some sand around, it wouldn’t have killed them, this way he could slip at any moment and smash in the back of his head.

Well, which way do I go in here? To the right, to the left? Ah yes, sorry… All right, then. First, about greatness, he thought, heading for a completely dark corridor. Now this is more like it—a carpet. They got that right! Only they didn’t think to put in torches. That’s always the way with them: they might put in torches, or even floodlights, but then there won’t be any carpet. Or the other way around, like now… So—greatness…

In speaking of greatness, we recall the so-called great names. Archimedes. Very good! Syracuse, “Eureka,” the bathhouse… bathtubs, that is. Naked. Next. Attila! The doge of Venice. I beg your pardon, Othello was the doge of Venice. Attila was the king of the Huns. Riding along. As silent and somber as the grave… But we don’t need to look so for examples! Peter! Greatness. Peter the Great, the First. Peter the Second and Peter the Third weren’t great. And very possibly that’s because they weren’t the first. It’s extraordinary how often “great” and “first” are effectively synonyms. Althooough. Catherine the Second, the Great. The second, but nevertheless the great. It is important to note this exception. We shall often encounter exceptions of this kind, which merely serve, as it were, to confirm the rule…

He firmly clasped his hands together behind his back, tucked his chin into his chest, and strode to and fro several times, each time elegantly skirting around his stool. Then he pulled his stool out with his foot, braced his fingers on the table, knitted his brows together, and looked over the heads of his audience.

The table, clad in gray zinc, was completely bare, and it stretched out in front of him like a major highway. He couldn’t see the far end of it. Down there little candle flames blinked though a yellow mist as they fluttered in the draft, and Andrei thought with fleeting annoyance that damn it all, it was indecent, at least he ought to be able to see who was down there, at the far end of the table. It was far more important to see him than these… But then, that’s none of my concern…

He examined the rows of “these” with indifferent condescension. Meekly seated along both sides of the table, with their attentive faces turned toward him—faces of stone, cast iron, copper, gold, bronze, plaster, jasper… and whatever other kinds of faces they could have. Silver, for instance. Or jade, say… Their unseeing eyes were repellent, and anyway, what could possibly be attractive about those ponderous carcasses, with their knees jutting up a meter, or even two, above the tabletop? At least they were keeping quiet and sitting still. At this moment any movement would have been unbearable. Andrei listened in delight, with a pleasure that was almost sensual, as the final drops of his brilliantly executed pause drained away.

“But what is the rule? Of what does it consist? What is the nature of its intrinsic essence, intrinsic exclusively to this and not to any other substantive predication? In this regard I’m afraid I shall have to talk about things that you are not accustomed to hearing about, things you will not find pleasant to hear… Greatness. Ah, how much has been said, painted, danced, and sung about it! What would the human race be without the category of greatness? A gang of naked monkeys that would make even Hnoipek look like the apex of civilization, would it not? After all, no specific, individual Hnoipek knows the proper measure of things—‘modus in rebus.’ Nature has taught him only how to digest and reproduce. Any other action performed by the aforesaid Hnoipek cannot be independently evaluated by him as being either good or bad or useful, nor as being either futile or harmful—and precisely as a consequence of this very situation, other things being equal, sooner or later each specific, individual Hnoipek finds himself facing a field court martial, and this court decides how to deal with him… Thus, the absence of any internal court that passes judgement is naturally compensated, I would even say fated to be compensated, by the presence of an external court, for instance a field court martial… However, gentlemen, a society consisting of Hnoipeks and also, without a doubt, of Skanks, is simply not capable of devoting such a huge amount of attention to the external court—it matters not if it be a military court martial or a jury court, a secret inquisition court or a lynching court, a Vehmic court or a so-called honor court. Not to mention comrades’ courts and other such instances… It became necessary to find a form for organizing the chaos consisting of the sexual and digestive organs of both Hnoipeks and Skanks, a form for this shambolic universal bedlam, such that at least some of the functions of the aforementioned external courts could be transferred to an internal court. And that was when the category of greatness became both necessary and serviceable! The point being, gentlemen, that in the vast and entirely amorphous horde of Hnoipeks, in the vast and even more amorphous horde of Skanks, from time to time individuals appear for whom the meaning of life is by no means primarily or entirely limited to the digestive and sexual functions. There is, if you will, a third need! This individual is not content merely to digest something and derive pleasure from the physical charms of others. In addition to this, you see, he wants to create something remarkable and out of the ordinary, something that never existed before. For example, some multileveled or, let’s say, hierarchical structure. Or some kind of wild mountain goat on a wall. With balls. Or he wants to write a myth about Aphrodite… What the hell he needs all this for, he himself doesn’t really understand. And indeed, what would Hnoipek want with Aphrodite born of the sea foam, or that wild mountain goat on a wall. With balls. Hypotheses do exist, of course—there are quite a few of them! After all, a wild mountain goat is a great deal of meat, isn’t it? I won’t even go into the subject of Aphrodite. However, if we are to be entirely honest and frank, the origin of this third need remains a mystery for our materialistic science as yet. But at the present moment this should not be of any interest to us. What is important to us at the present moment, my friends? The sudden appearance in the gray common herd of an individual who is not content with crud like oatmeal porridge or a filthy Skank whose legs are a mass of red blotches; he’s not content with the universally accessible realism but starts idealizing and abstracting, the lousy pest; he starts mentally transforming oatmeal porridge into a juicy wild mountain goat covered in garlic sauce and transforming a Skank into a voluptuous, well-washed creature with hips—she came out of the ocean, he says. Out of the water… Why, heavens above! A man like that is invaluable! A man like that should be set upon a high place and the Hnoipeks and Skanks should be led out to him by the battalion, in order to teach the parasites to know their place. Hey there, you crummy bastards, can you do what he can? Hey there, you lousy redheaded jerk, can you paint a burger that looks so juicy, it makes you want to gobble it down on the spot? Or make up a little joke at least? You can’t? Then what makes you think you can set yourself on the same level as him? Go and work, work, work your asses off. Catch fish, gather mussels!”

Andrei pushed himself back from the table and walked to and fro again, exultantly rubbing his hands together. It had all turned out just great. Magnificent! Without any synopses. And all these tedious old fogies had listened with bated breath. Not a single one had moved. Oh yeah, that’s me! Of course, I’m not Katzman, I keep quiet most of the time, but if they wind me up, if they ask me, dammit…

Uh oh, looks like someone else has started up down there at the invisible end of the table. Some Jew or other. Maybe Katzman crept in after all? Well, we’ll see who comes off best.

“And so, greatness as a category arose out of creativity, for only he who creates is great, only he who creates something new, previously unheard of. But let us ask ourselves, dear sirs: In that case who’s going to stick their noses in the shit? Who’s going to say to them, where are you going, scumbag, who do you think you are? Who will be, so to speak, the creative individual’s high priest?—I’m not afraid to use that term. The one who will be his priest, dearest gentlemen, is the individual who can’t paint the aforementioned burger or Aphrodite, say, but no way does he want to gather mussels—the creative organizer, the creative liner-up in ranks, the creative extorter of gifts and likewise distributor thereof! And this brings us face-to-face with the question of the role of God and the Devil in history. A question that is, quite frankly, a highly complex, knotty tangle, a question concerning which everyone has piled lie upon lie… After all, even a babe in arms with no religion knows that God is a good person, and the Devil, conversely, is a bad person. But this is driveling gibberish, gentlemen! What do we really know about them? That God set about chaos and organized it, while the Devil, on the contrary, strives every day and every hour to demolish this organization, this structure, and return it to chaos. This is true, is it not? But on the other hand, the whole of history teaches us that man as an individual aspires precisely to chaos. He wants to exist on his own terms. He wants to do what he feels like doing. He constantly clamors about how he is free from nature. And we don’t have to look far for examples—take our notorious Hnoipek yet again! You understand, I hope, what I’m driving at? What, let me ask you, has been the stock-in-trade of the most savage tyrants throughout history? They have all, without exception, striven to take the aforementioned chaos, intrinsic to man, that selfsame chaotic, amorphous hnoipekoskankness, and arrange it in decorous order, organize it, institutionalize it, neatly line it up—preferably in a single column—aim it at a single point, and generally clamp down on it. Or, to put it more simply, to do it in. And by the way, as a general rule, they have succeeded! Although, it’s true, not for very long, and only at the cost of spilling a lot of blood. So I ask you: Who is really the good person here? The one who aspires to allow the free play of chaos—a.k.a. freedom, equality, and brotherhood—or the one who aspires to reduce this hnoipekoskankness (read as ‘social entropy’!) to the minimum? Who? And that’s the whole point!”

Now that was a fine passage… Lean and precise, but at the same time not without a certain passion… Just what is he droning about, down there at the other end? Son of a bitch, what a rude bastard! Interfering with my work, and basically—

Andrei suddenly noticed with an ominous feeling that several heads in the neat rows of listeners were turned with their backs toward him. He looked more closely. There was no doubt about it—the backs of several heads. One, two… six of them! He cleared his throat as forcefully as he could and gravely rapped his knuckles on the zinc-clad tabletop. It didn’t do any good. Well, just you wait, he thought menacingly. I’ll get you now! What would that be in Latin?

“Quos ego!” he barked. “It seems like you’ve gotten it into your heads that you mean something? We’re made of stone, and you’re just putrefying flesh? We’re from everlasting to everlasting, and you’re ephemeral trash? Here, take that!” He gave them the fig sign. “Who remembers you anyway? You were all erected in memory of some jerks or other who were forgotten long ago… Archimedes—big deal! Sure, I know there was someone called that who ran naked through the streets—absolutely shameless… And so what? At the appropriate level of civilization they would have ripped his balls off for that. To teach him not to run around that way. ‘Eureka’—know what I mean? Or that Peter the Great. So, OK, he was the czar, the Emperor of All Russia… We’ve seen plenty of his kind. But what was his surname? Eh? You don’t know? All those monuments that have been erected! All those works that have been written! But just ask a student at his examination—you’ll be lucky if one out of ten remembers what his surname was. That’s ‘great’ for you! And it’s the same with all of you, isn’t it? Either no one remembers you at all, they just gape and bat their eyelids, or, let’s say, they do remember the first name but not the surname. And vice versa too: they remember the surname—the Kalinga Prize—but as for the first name… Who gives a damn about the first name? Who was he anyway? Maybe he was some kind of writer, or maybe he speculated in wool… Who wants to know, anyway, judge for yourself. Remembering all of you would make a man forget the price of vodka.”

Now he could see the backs of more than ten heads in front of him. It was offensive. And down at the other end Katzman was getting louder and louder, pushier and pushier, but his droning was still as unintelligible as ever.

“A lure!” Andrei yelled with all his might. “That’s what your much-vaunted greatness is! A lure! Hnoipek looks at you and thinks, well, would you ever, what tremendous people have lived in the world. Right, I’ll give up drinking, I’ll give up smoking, I’ll stop tumbling my Skank around in the bushes, I’ll go and join a library, and I’ll achieve all this too… That is, that’s what he’s supposed to think! But that’s not what he really thinks when he looks at you, no way! And if they don’t post sentries around you and fence you in, he’ll crap great big heaps all around you, write words on you with chalk, and go back to his Skank, feeling very pleased with himself. So much for your educational function! So much for the memory of mankind! And what the hell would Hnoipek want with memory anyway? Why the hell should he remember you, pray tell? Admittedly, there have been times when remembering all of you was considered good form. So what could people do—they committed you to memory. Alexander the Great, the king of Macedonia, that is, born on this date, died on that date. A conqueror. Bucephalus. ‘Countess, your Bucephalus is rather tired, and by the way, how would you like to sleep with me?’ Polite, eloquent, genteel… You have to cram stuff at school now too, of course. Born on this date, died on that date, member of the ruling oligarchical clique. Exploiter. And it’s absolutely impossible to understand who needs all that. We just used to pass the exam then wash our hands of the whole business. ‘Alexander the Great was a great general too, but why go smashing stools?’ That was this film. Chapaev. Have you seen it? ‘My brother Mika’s dying, he’s asking for fish broth…’ And that’s all your Alexander the Great is good for.”

Andrei stopped talking. All this talk was pointless. No one was listening to him. Now the backs of all the heads were turned toward him—cast iron, stone, iron, jade… shaved, bald, curly, with little braids, chipped and dented, or else completely concealed under chain mail, helmets, three-cornered hats. They don’t like it, he thought. The truth is hard to swallow. They’re used to anthems and odes. Exegi monumentum… But what did I say that was so upsetting? Well, of course, I didn’t lie, I didn’t grovel to you—I just said what I thought. I’ve got nothing against greatness. Pushkin. Lenin. Einstein… I don’t like idolatry. Deeds should be worshipped, not statues. And maybe not even deeds should be worshipped. Because everyone only does what he’s capable of doing. One makes a revolution, another makes a tin whistle. Maybe I only have enough strength for a tin whistle—so now does that mean I’m shit?

But the voice from behind the yellow fog kept droning on, and now he could hear separate words: “…unprecedented and exceptional… from a catastrophic situation… only you… merits eternal gratitude and eternal glory…” Now that’s what I really can’t stand, thought Andrei. I absolutely hate it when someone juggles with eternalities. Brothers for all eternity. Eternal friendship. Together for eternity. Eternal glory… Where do they get all that from? What can they see that’s eternal?

“Stop lying!” he shouted down the table. “Have you no shame?”

No one took any notice of him. He turned around and plodded back the way he came, feeling the draft chilling him to the bone—the stinking draft, saturated with the fetid vapors of the crypt, rust and tarnished copper… It wasn’t Izya jabbering there, was it, he listlessly thought. Izya has never spoken words like that in his entire life. I shouldn’t have blamed him… I shouldn’t have come here. Why the hell did I come here anyway? Probably I thought I’d understood something. After all, I’m over thirty now, it’s time to be figuring out what’s what. What sort of crazy idea is that—trying to persuade monuments that no one needs them? You might as well try to persuade people that no one needs them… Maybe that’s the way it is, but who’s going to believe it?

Something’s happened to me in the last few years, he thought. I’ve lost something… I’ve lost my sense of a goal, that’s what. About five years ago, I knew for certain why I had to take one course of action or another. But now—I don’t know. I know that Hnoipek should be put up against the wall, but I don’t understand what for. I mean, I understand that it would make my job a whole lot easier, but is that all it’s needed for—to make my job easier? I’m the only one who needs that. For myself. That’s probably right. No one else is going to live my life for me, I’ll have to take care of that for myself. But it’s boring, depressing, I don’t have the strength… And I don’t have any choice either, he thought. That’s what I’ve understood. A man can’t do anything; he doesn’t know how to do anything. The only thing he can do and knows how to do is live for himself. He even gritted his teeth at the hopeless clarity and certitude of this thought.

Walking out of the crypt into the shade of the columns, he screwed up his eyes. The yellow, sweltering square, studded with empty pediments, lay stretched out before him. The heat from it surged over him, like a blast from a furnace. Heat, thirst, exhaustion… This was the world in which he had to live and also, therefore, to act.

Izya was sleeping, stretched out on the stone slabs in the shade, with his forehead nestling in an open book. A jagged tear gaped open in the back of his trousers and his feet in down-at-heel shoes were unnaturally turned out. And in addition he stank from a mile away. The Mute was right there—squatting on his haunches with his eyes closed, leaning back against a column, with the automatic lying on his knees.

“Reveille,” Andrei said wearily.

The Mute opened his eyes and got up. Izya raised his head and looked at Andrei through swollen eyebrows.

“Where’s Pak?” Andrei asked, looking around.

Izya sat up, sank his hooked fingers into his mop of hair, and started scratching furiously. “Daaamn…” he mumbled in a thick voice. “Listen, I’m desperately hungry… How long can this last?”

“We’ll leave straightaway,” Andrei told him, still looking around. “Where’s Pak?”

“Gontolibry,” Izya replied, yawning fervently. “Ah, yuck, I’m totally wasted, dammit…”

“Where did he go?”

“He went to the library.” Izya jumped to his feet, picked up his small volume, and started stuffing it into his rucksack. “We decided that he’d go and select some books in the meantime. What time is it now? Seems like my watch has stopped…”

Andrei glanced at his own watch. “Three,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Maybe we could eat first?” Izya tentatively suggested.

“As we walk,” said Andrei. He had a vaguely uneasy feeling. Something was bothering him. Something was wrong. He took the automatic from the Mute, narrowed his eyes, and strode out onto the incandescent steps.

“That’s just great…” Izya grumbled behind him. “Now we eat on the move. I waited for him, like an honest man, and he won’t even let me eat right… Hey, Mute, hand me that rucksack…”

Andrei walked quickly between the pediments, without looking back. He was hungry too, his insides felt sore, but something urged him to keep moving, and move fast. He arranged the strap of his automatic more comfortably on his shoulder and glanced rapidly at his watch again. It was still one minute to three. His watch had stopped.

“Hey, Mr. Counselor!” Izya called to him. “Take this.”

Andrei stopped for a moment and accepted two hard biscuits with a filling of fatty canned pork. Izya was already zestfully crunching and chomping. Andrei examined his sandwich as he walked along, trying to see which side would be most convenient to bite on, and asked, “When did Pak leave?”

“Well, he went almost immediately,” Izya said with his mouth full. “The two of us looked over the Pantheon, and we didn’t find anything interesting, so he set off.”

“That was wrong,” said Andrei. He’d realized what was worrying him.

“What was wrong?”

Andrei didn’t answer.

4

There was no sign of Pak in the library. Of course; he was never intending to come in here. The books were still lying in a heap, exactly like before.

“Strange,” said Izya, turning his head this way and that in bewilderment. “He said he was going to pick out everything on sociology.”

“He said, he said,” Andrei growled through his teeth. He kicked the nearest plump volume with the toe of his shoe, turned around, and ran down the stairs. “So he outfoxed us after all. Cunning old slant-eye outfoxed us. The Jew of the Far East…” Andrei didn’t really understand what the Jew of the Far East had done that was so cunning, but every fiber of his being cried out that he had been outfoxed.

Now they stuck close to the walls as they walked along—Andrei on the right side of the street and the Mute, who had also realized things were looking ugly, on the left. Izya tried to set out straight down the middle, but Andrei yelled at him so fiercely that the archivist immediately dashed back and fell in behind him, walking with him step for step, sniffing in indignation and scornfully snorting. The visibility was about fifty meters; beyond that the street looked as if it were submerged in an aquarium, with everything blurred and trembling, shimmering and glimmering—waterweed even seemed to be rippling above the surface of the road.

When they drew level with the movie theater, the Mute suddenly stopped. Andrei, who was watching him out of the corner of his eye, stopped too. The Mute stood there motionless, as if he were listening to something, clutching his naked machete in his lowered hand.

“I smell burning,” Izya in a low voice behind Andrei.

And Andrei immediately caught the smell of burning too. That’s it, he thought, gritting his teeth.

The Mute raised the hand holding the machete, gestured along the street, and moved on. They covered another two hundred meters or so, taking every possible precaution. The burning smell grew stronger—a cocktail of hot metal, smoldering rags, diesel oil, and some other sweetish, almost appetizing odors. What happened back there? Andrei thought, gritting his teeth so hard he heard his temples crack. What have they gone and done? he repeated over and over in his anguish. What’s burning back there? Because that’s where the burning is, no doubt about it… And at that moment he saw Pak.

He immediately thought it was Pak because the body was wearing the familiar jacket of faded blue denim twill. No one else in the camp had a jacket like that. The Korean was lying on the corner of the street, with his legs sprawled out and his head lowered onto his short-barreled, handmade automatic. The short barrel was pointing along the street in the direction of the camp. Pak looked unusually fat, as if he’d been inflated, and his hands were a glossy bluish-black.

Before Andrei could even grasp what he was really seeing, Izya shoved him aside with a strange croaking sound and trampled on Andrei’s feet as he darted across the intersection and went down on his knees beside the dead body.

Andrei gulped and looked toward the Mute, who was nodding emphatically and pointing to something up ahead with his machete. Andrei spotted another body up there, at the very limit of visibility—someone else fat and black was lying there. And now through the haze Andrei caught sight of an image, distorted by refraction—a column of gray smoke rising up over the roofs.

Lowering his automatic, Andrei cut across the intersection. Izya had already gotten up off his knees, and when Andrei got close, he realized why: the body in the light blue denim twill exuded an unbearable, sickly sweet odor.

“My God…” said Izya, turning his dead face, streaming with sweat, toward Andrei. “They killed him, the scum… All of them together aren’t worth even his little finger…”

Andrei glanced down briefly at the ghastly, bloated puppet with a black, gaping wound where the back of its head ought to be. The sun glinted dully on a scattering of copper cartridge cases. Andrei walked around Izya and cut slantwise across the street, no longer hiding or stooping over, toward the next bloated puppet and the Mute, who was already squatting down beside it.

This one was lying on his back, and although his face was appallingly swollen and black, Andrei recognized him: it was one of the geologists, Quejada’s deputy for surveying work, Ted Kaminski. It seemed especially horrible that he was dressed in nothing but his shorts and, for some strange reason, a wadded jacket like the drivers wore. He had obviously been shot from behind, and the burst of gunfire had passed right through him—on his chest the jacket was peppered with holes, with clumps of gray wadding sticking out of them. An automatic rifle with no ammunition clip was lying about five steps away.

The Mute touched Andrei on the shoulder and pointed ahead, to where there was another body, doubled up and huddled against the wall on the right side of the street. It turned out to be Permyak. He had obviously been shot in the middle of the street—there was still a dried-out black patch on the cobblestones there—but in his agony he had crept over to the wall, leaving a thick black trail behind him, and died with his head tucked down, clutching his bullet-shredded stomach in his arms with every last ounce of strength.

They had killed each other here in a fit of demented fury, like enraged predators, like frenzied tarantulas, like rats deranged by hunger. Like men.

Tevosyan was in the unpaved side street nearest to the camp, lying slantwise across the road on the dried-up excrement. He had been chasing the tractor, which turned into this alley and moved off toward the precipice, ripping up the hard-baked earth with its impatient caterpillar treads. Tevosyan chased it all the way from the camp, shooting as he ran, and they shot at him from the tractor, and here, at the intersection where the statue with the toadish face had stood that night, they got him, and he had been left lying here, grinning with his yellow teeth, in his army tunic, smeared with dust, excrement, and blood. But before he died, or maybe after he died, he hit the target too: halfway to the cliff edge, Sergeant Vogel was lying in a bloated heap, clutching with his gnarled fingers at the earth crushed to powder by the caterpillar tracks. From there the tractor had gone on without him—all the way to the cliff edge and down into the Abyss.

In the camp a burnt-out sled was smoldering. Little tongues of smoky orange flame were still flicking over the metal barrels, warped and battered by the bullets shot through them and turned bluish-black by the heat, and clouds of greasy smoke were rising up into the pale sky. Someone’s burnt legs protruded from a caked heap of slag on a trailer, and the appetizing odor that made Andrei feel nauseous hung in the air.

Roulier’s naked body was hanging out the window of the cartographers’ room—his long, hairy arms reached almost down to the sidewalk, where an automatic rifle was lying. The wall all around the window was gouged and chipped by bullets, and on the opposite side of the street Vasilenko and Palotti were lying together in a heap, cut down by a single burst of gunfire. There were no weapons anywhere near them, and Vasilenko’s shrunken face still wore an expression of boundless amazement and fear.

The other geologist, the other cartographer, and Ellisauer, the deputy expedition leader for technical matters, had all been stood up against that same wall and shot. They were lying there in row in front of a door riddled with bullet holes—Ellisauer in his shorts, and the other two naked.

And at the very center of this stinking hecatomb, right in the middle of the street, Colonel St. James, draped in the British flag, was calmly lying on a table with aluminum legs, with his hands folded on his chest. He was in full dress uniform, with all his medals. Still as prim and imperturbable as ever, and even smiling ironically. Beside him, with his gray-haired head nestling against the road, lay Duggan—also in full dress uniform, and clutching the colonel’s broken cane in his hands.

And that was all. Six soldiers, including Hnoipek, plus the engineer Quejada and the debauched girl Skank, and the tractor with its sled, had disappeared, leaving behind corpses, geological equipment dumped in a heap, and a few automatic rifles stacked in a pyramid. And a vile stench. And greasy soot. And a suffocating odor of roasted flesh from the sled that was still smoldering. Andrei stumbled into his room, collapsed into a chair, and lowered his head onto his hands with a groan. It was all over. Forever. And there was no salvation from the pain, no salvation from the shame, and no salvation from death.

I brought them here. I did it. I left them here on their own, like a stinking coward. I wanted to take a break. From their ugly faces—what a skunk, what a namby-pamby jerk, what a lousy wuss… Colonel, ah, Colonel! You shouldn’t have died, you shouldn’t have done that! If I hadn’t gone he wouldn’t have died. If he hadn’t died, no one here would have dared to lift a finger. Animals, animals… Hyenas! I ought to have shot them, shot them!

He gave another long, drawn-out groan and dragged his wet cheek across his sleeve. We’ve been idling away the time in libraries… making speeches to statues… You lousy bungler, you bag of wind, you screwed everything up, let everything unravel… So now croak, you bastard! No one will cry. What damned use are you to anyone anyway? But I’m afraid, aren’t I, afraid. But it’s so horrible, so horrible… They hunted each other down, they shot each other—they shot men lying on the ground, they shot dead men, they put them up against the wall, swearing and reviling them, punching and kicking them… How did it come to this, guys? What have I reduced you to? And for what? For what?

He slammed his fists down onto the tabletop, then straightened up and wiped his face with his open palm. Through the window he could hear Izya screeching inarticulately and the Mute cooing soothingly, like a pigeon. I don’t want to live, Andrei thought. I don’t want to. To hell with all this. He got up from the table to go out there, to Izya, to the men—and suddenly he saw the expedition log lying open in front of him. He pushed it away from him in disgust, but immediately noticed that the last page wasn’t written in his handwriting. He sat down again and started reading.

Quejada wrote:

Then came the usual gobbledygook about provisions and water expended, about the temperature and the wind, and also an order appointing Sergeant Vogel commander of the military unit, a reprimand to deputy expedition leader for technical matters Ellisauer for procrastination, and an order, also to Ellisauer, to expedite the repair of the second tractor. After that Quejada wrote:

After that the page was streaked with black zigzags and spatters of ink, and the entries came to an end. Evidently shooting had broken out in the street, and Quejada had jumped up and never come back.

Andrei reread the entries twice. Yes, Quejada, this is what you wanted. You got what you wanted. And I blamed it all on Pak, may he rest in peace… He bit his lip and squeezed his eyes shut when the bloated puppet in a faded blue jacket appeared in front of him again, and suddenly he realized. Day thirty-two? Thirty! Yesterday I wrote the entry for day twenty-eight… He flipped the page back hurriedly. Yes. Twenty-eight… And these bloated corpses—they’ve been lying here for days… My God, what is all this? One, two… What date is it today? We only left this morning!

And he remembered the hot square studded with empty pediments, and the icy darkness of the Pantheon, and the blind statues at the infinitely long table… That was a long time ago. It was a very long time ago. Yep, yep. Some unholy power must have swept me up and swirled me around, set my head spinning and addled my brains… I could have come back the same day. I would have found the colonel still alive, I wouldn’t have let it happen…

The door swung open and Izya walked in, looking like a different person—all dried out, somehow, with a bony, tight-drawn face, sullen and bitter, as if it wasn’t he who had just been shrieking under the windows like a woman. He flung his half-empty rucksack into the corner, sat in an armchair facing Andrei, and said, “The bodies have been lying here for at least three days. What’s happening? Do you understand?”

Without saying anything, Andrei pushed the logbook across the table to him. Izya avidly grabbed it, devoured the entries in a single gulp, and looked up at Andrei with red eyes.

“The Experiment is the Experiment,” Andrei said with a crooked grin.

“Lousy, devious crap…” Izya said with hatred and disgust. He glanced through the log entries again and dropped the logbook on the table.

“I think they tampered with us at the square,” said Andrei. “Where the pediments are.”

Izya nodded, leaned back in the armchair, jerked up his beard, and closed his eyes. “Well, what are we going to do, Counselor?” he asked.

Andrei didn’t answer.

“Just don’t you even think of shooting yourself!” said Izya. “I know you… the Komsomol member… the young eagle…”

Andrei gave another crooked grin and tugged on his collar. “Listen,” he said, “let’s go somewhere else…”

Izya opened his eyes and stared at him.

“The stink from the window…” Andrei said with an effort. “I can’t…”

“Let’s go to my room,” said Izya.

In the corridor the Mute got up to greet them. Andrei took hold of his bare, muscular arm and drew him along. They all walked into Izya’s room together. The windows here looked out onto a different street. Beyond the low roofs behind the windows, the Yellow Wall soared upward. There was no stink at all here, and for some reason it was even cool. Only there was nowhere to sit—the floor was completely covered with heaps of paper and books.

“On the floor, sit on the floor,” Izya said, and collapsed onto the tangled, dirty sheets on his bed. “Let’s think,” he said. “I don’t intend to croak here. I’ve still got a whole heap of work to do.”

“What’s there to think about?” Andrei said morosely. “It all comes down to one thing… There’s no water, they took it. And all the food’s been burned. There’s no way back—we’d never make it across the desert… If we overtook those scumbags… But then, we can’t, it’s been days…” He paused for a moment. “If we could find water—is it far to that pumping station of yours?”

“About twenty kilometers,” said Izya. “Or thirty.”

“If we travel by night, in the cool…”

“We can’t travel by night,” said Izya. “It’s too dark. And the wolves…”

“There aren’t any wolves here,” Andrei objected.

“How do you know that?”

“Well, then let’s just shoot ourselves and to hell with it,” said Andrei. He already knew he wasn’t going to shoot himself. He wanted to live. He’d never realized before how much he could want to live.

“Ah, come on,” said Izya. “But seriously?”

“Seriously, I want to live. And I will survive. I don’t give a rotten damn for anything now. It’s just the two of us now, got it? The two of us have got to survive, and that’s all. And they can all damn well go to hell. We’ll just find water and live beside it.”

“That’s right,” said Izya. He sat up on the bed, pushed his hand under his shirt, and started scratching. “We’ll spend the day drinking water, and I’ll spend the night screwing you.”

Andrei looked at him, bewildered. “Have you got any other suggestions?” he asked.

“Not yet. That’s right—we have to find water. Without water we’re done for. Then we’ll see what comes after that. What I’m thinking right now is this: they obviously took off out of here in a big hurry, straight after the bloodbath. They were afraid. They climbed into the sled and stepped on the gas! We ought to ferret around in the house a bit—we’re bound to find water and food here…” He was about to say something else, but he stopped with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging. “Look, look!” he said in a frightened whisper.

Andrei rapidly swung around to face the window. He didn’t notice anything unusual at first; he only heard something—a kind of distant rumbling, like a landslide, as if rocks were showering down somewhere… Then his eyes spotted movement on the vertical yellow cliff face above the roofs.

From out of the bluish-whitish haze up high above, a strange triangular cloud was hurtling downward, with its pointed angle first. It was moving down from an unbelievable height, and was still a very long way from the foot of the Wall, but he could already make out a bulky form with painfully familiar outlines spinning furiously at the leading point, crashing into invisible projections and bouncing off them. At every blow, parts flew off the hulk and carried on falling beside it. Crushed rock hurtled down, fanning out as it fell, puffs of bright dust swirled up, and they drew together to form a cloud that widened out farther and farther, like the wake behind the stern of a speedboat, and the distant, rumbling roar grew louder, breaking up into separate blows, a drumroll of fragments crashing against the monolithic Cliff, the menacing rustling of a gigantic landslide…

“The tractor!” Izya exclaimed in a strangled voice.

Andrei only understood what Izya had said at the last moment, when the mangled and twisted vehicle smashed into the roofs, the floor under his feet shuddered from the appalling impact, a column of brick dust swirled upward, and fragments of stone and metal sheeting were sent flying through the air—an instant later all this was hidden under the tidal wave of the yellow avalanche.

For a long time they sat there without speaking, listening as the rumbling, crunching, and snapping tumbled on, and the floor under their feet kept shaking, and they couldn’t see anything over the roofs any longer through the motionless yellow cloud.

“Holy shit!” said Izya. “How the hell did they get up there?”

“Who?” Andrei asked obtusely.

“That’s our tractor, you blockhead!”

“What do you mean, our tractor? The one that took off?”

Izya massaged his nose as vigorously as he could with his dirty fingers before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t understand a thing. . . Do you understand it?” he suddenly asked, turning to the Mute. “I don’t understand a thing.”

The Mute nodded indifferently. Izya slammed his fist down on his knees in annoyance, but just then the Mute made a strange gesture: he stretched his index finger out in front of him, rapidly lowered it to the floor, then lifted it up over his head, tracing out an elongated circle in the air.

“Well?” Izya asked avidly. “Well?”

The Mute shrugged and repeated the same gesture. Andrei suddenly remembered something, and when he remembered, he immediately understood everything.

“Falling Stars!” he exclaimed. “Well, would you believe it!” he laughed bitterly. “And I’ve only understood it now!”

“What have you understood?” Izya yelled. “What stars?”

Still laughing, Andrei just waved his hand. “Forget it,” he said. “Forget it, the whole damned thing! What does it matter to us now? No more blathering, Katzman! We have to survive, got that? Survive! In this abominable, impossible world! We need water, Katzman!”

“Hang on, hang on…” Izya muttered.

“There’s nothing else I want!” Andrei roared, shaking his clenched fists. “I don’t want to understand anything anymore! I don’t want to find out anything! Those are dead bodies lying out there, Katzman! Dead bodies! They wanted to live too, didn’t they, Katzman? And now they’re bloated and they’re rotting!”

Thrusting out his beard, Izya got up off the bed, grabbed hold of Andrei’s jacket, and forced him to sit down on the floor.

“Shut up!” he said with terrible wheezing hiss. “Want me to smack you in the face right now? I will. You whining old woman!”

Andrei grated his teeth and said nothing.

Puffing and panting, Izya went back to his bed and started scratching again. “He’s never seen dead bodies before…” he growled. “Never seen this world before. Stop griping, you wimp!”

Burying his face in his hands, Andrei fought to trample down and crush the senseless, hideous wailing inside him. But some small corner of his mind understood what was happening to him, and that helped. It was terrifying to be here, surrounded by dead men, supposedly still alive yourself but actually already dead too… Izya was saying something, but Andrei couldn’t hear it. Then it passed. “What were you saying?” he asked, taking his hands away from his face.

“I was saying that I’ll go and ferret around in the soldiers’ quarters, and you ferret around in the intelligentsia’s room. And don’t forget Quejada’s room—he must have kept some kind of geologists’ emergency supplies in there somewhere. And don’t panic, we’ll pull through this.”

At that moment the sun went out.

“Damnation! The worst possible moment!” said Izya. “Now we have to look for a lamp… Hang on, your lamp ought to be here somewhere, right?”

“Our watches,” Andrei said with an effort. “We have to set our watches…”

He raised his wrist to his eyes, focused on the phosphorescent hands, and set them to 1200 hours. Izya was scrabbling around in the darkness, swearing through his teeth, moving his bed around for some reason, and rustling papers. Then a match scraped and lit. Izya stood on his knees in the middle of the room, waving the match from side to side.

“Don’t just sit there, damn you,” he yelled. “Look for the lamp! Move it, I’ve only got three matches!”

Andrei got up reluctantly, but the Mute had already found the lamp, raised the glass, and handed it to Izya. The room got brighter. Izya wiggled his beard intently as he tried to adjust the burner. But he fumbled too clumsily and the burner refused to be adjusted. The Mute, gleaming all over with sweat, went back into the corner, squatted down on his haunches, and stared out at Andrei from there with plaintive devotion, his eyes wide open like a child’s. The troops. The rump of a routed army…

“Let me have the lamp,” said Andrei.

He took the lamp from Izya and adjusted the burner.

“Let’s go,” he ordered.

He pushed open the door of the colonel’s room. The windows here were firmly closed and the glass in them was unbroken, so he couldn’t smell the stench at all. The air smelled of tobacco and eau de cologne. Of the colonel.

Everything was neat and tidy: the high-quality leather of two packed suitcases glimmered in the lamplight; the folding camp bed was made up without a single wrinkle. At the head of the bed a shoulder belt with a holster and military cap with an immense visor hung on a nail. A gas lantern stood on a circle of felt on a bulky chest of drawers in the corner, with a box of matches, a pile of books, and a pair of binoculars in a case lying beside it.

Andrei put down his lamp on the table and looked around again. The tray with the flask and inverted shot glasses was standing on one shelf of an empty bookcase.

“Hand me that,” Andrei said to the Mute.

The Mute darted across, grabbed the tray, and set it on the table, beside the lamp. Andrei poured cognac into the shot glasses. There were only two of them, so he filled the cap of the flask for himself.

“Take it,” he said. “Here’s to life.”

Izya gave him an approving look, took a shot glass, and sniffed at it with the air of a connoisseur.

“That’s good stuff! Here’s to life, you say? Is this really life?” He giggled, clinked glasses with the Mute, and drained his glass. His eyes turned moist. “Goo-ood,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.

The Mute drained his glass, too—as if it were water, without the slightest interest. But Andrei carried on standing there, holding the full flask-cap, in no hurry to down his drink. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t really know what it was. Yet another major stage was ending and a new one was beginning. And although he couldn’t possibly expect anything good from tomorrow, at least tomorrow was a reality—an exceptionally tangible reality, because it could well be one of a very, very small number of days still remaining. This was a feeling entirely new to Andrei, a very poignant feeling.

But he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he just repeated the same words—“Here’s to life!”—and drank.

Then he lit the colonel’s gas lantern and handed it to Izya, with a promise: “You smash that one, you cack-handed hairy ape, and I’ll box your ears for you.”

Izya left, muttering resentfully, but Andrei lingered on, absentmindedly glancing around the room. Of course, he ought to ferret around in here—Duggan must have kept some kind of stash for the colonel—but the idea of ferreting around in this place somehow felt… shameful, was that it?

“Don’t be shy, Andrei, don’t be shy,” he suddenly heard a familiar voice say. “The dead don’t need anything.”

The Mute was sitting on the edge of the table, dangling his legs, and he wasn’t the Mute any longer—or, rather, not entirely the Mute. He was still wearing only his trousers, with the machete on the broad belt, but now his skin was dry, a matte ivory color, his face had rounded out, and his cheeks had acquired a healthy bloom, like two peaches. It was the Mentor, as large as life—and the sight of him brought Andrei neither joy nor hope; it didn’t lift his spirits. He felt annoyed and uneasy.

“You again…” he growled, turning his back to the Mentor. “Long time no see.”

He walked over to the window, pressed his forehead against the warm glass, and started looking out into the darkness that was faintly illuminated by little flames on the still-smoldering sled. “Well, as you can see, we’re all set to die here…”

“Why die?” the Mentor said cheerfully. “You have to live! You know, it’s never too late and always too early to die, isn’t that right?”

“And what if we don’t find water?”

“You’ll find it. You always have and you will now.”

“Good. We’ll find it. Do we live beside it for the rest of our lives? Then what’s the point of living?”

“What’s the point of living anyway?”

“That’s what I keep thinking too: what’s the point of living? I’ve lived a stupid life, Mentor. An idiotic kind of life. Bobbing about aimlessly like a turd that won’t flush. At first I fought for some kind of ideas, then for rugs that were in short supply, and then I totally flipped… and I destroyed those men.”

“Come on, come on, you’re not being serious,” said the Mentor. “People always end up dead. You’re not to blame for that, are you? You’re starting a new stage, Andrei, and, in my opinion, a decisive one. In a certain sense it’s actually good that things have turned out exactly this way. Sooner or later all this would inevitably have happened anyway. The expedition was doomed, wasn’t it? But you could have perished with it, without ever crossing this important borderline…”

“I wonder exactly what borderline that is,” Andrei said with a chuckle. He turned to face the Mentor. “I’ve already had ideas—all sorts of hooey about the good of society and other mumbo jumbo for kids still wet behind the ears… I’ve already made a career, thanks—I’ve had enough of being a big boss… So what else is there that can happen to me?”

“Understanding!” said the Mentor, slightly raising his voice.

“What—understanding? Understanding of what?”

“Understanding,” the Mentor repeated. “That’s what you’ve never had before—understanding!”

“I’ve got this understanding of yours right up to here now!” said Andrei, tapping the edge of his open hand against his Adam’s apple. “I understand everything in the world now. It took thirty years to reach this understanding, and now I’ve got there at last. Nobody needs me, and nobody needs anyone. Whether I exist or I don’t, whether I fight the fight or kick back and lounge on the sofa—it makes no difference. Nothing can be changed, nothing can be put right. All I can do is find myself a more or less comfortable niche. Everything moves along on its own; I don’t make any difference. There it is, that’s your understanding—and there’s nothing else left for me to understand. But you tell me what I’m supposed to do with this understanding! Pickle it for winter or eat it right now?”

The Mentor nodded. “Precisely,” he said. “That is the final borderline: What do you do with your understanding? How do you live with it? You have to live anyway, don’t you?”

“The right time to live is when you don’t have any understanding!” Andrei said with quiet fury. “With this understanding the right thing to do is die! And if I weren’t such a coward, if the damned protoplasm didn’t scream so loud inside me, I’d know what to do. I’d choose a good, strong rope…”

He stopped speaking.

The Mentor took the flask, carefully filled one shot glass, then the other, and pensively screwed the cap back on. “Well, let’s start from the fact that you’re not a coward,” he said. “And the reason you haven’t used that rope has nothing to do with you being afraid… Somewhere in your subconscious, and not so very deep, I assure you, lies the conviction that it is possible to live, even with understanding. And live pretty well. Interesting, that.” He started pushing one of the shot glasses over to Andrei with his fingernail. “Remember how your father tried to force you to read The War of the Worlds, and you didn’t want to? How furious you were—you stuck that cursed book under the sofa so you could get back to your illustrated Baron Munchausen… Wells bored you, he made you feel sick, you didn’t understand why the hell you had to read him, you didn’t want to know about him… But later you read that book twelve times, until you knew it by heart, you drew illustrations for it, and you even tried to write a sequel.”

“So what?” Andrei said morosely.

“And that kind of thing happened to you time and again!” said the Mentor. “And it will happen again, more than once. You’ve just had understanding hammered into you, and it makes you feel sick, you don’t understand what the hell you need it for, you don’t want to know about it…” He picked up his shot glass. “Here’s to the sequel!” he said.

Andrei stepped up to the table, and he took his shot glass, and he raised it to his lips, feeling the usual sense of relief as all his dismal doubts were dispersed yet again, and a new glimmer of light appeared somewhere up ahead in the darkness that had seemed impenetrable, and now he was supposed to drink up, and briskly slam the empty glass down onto the table, and say something bright and cheerful, and spring into action, but just at that moment some third character, who previously had always remained silent—he must have been sleeping, or lying around drunk, or he simply couldn’t give a damn—suddenly snickered and babbled, “Doo de doo de doo de doo!”

Andrei splashed the cognac onto the floor, put the shot glass down on the tray, stuck his hands in his pockets, and said, “But there’s something I still don’t understand, Mentor… Drink, drink, enjoy it, I’m not in the mood.” He couldn’t look at that ruddy face anymore. He turned away and went over to the window again. “You’re too much of a yes-man, Mr. Mentor. You’re Voronin number two, my yellow, rubbery conscience, a used condom… Everything’s fine with you, Voronin, everything’s just great, my dear friend. The important thing is that we’re safe and sound, and all the others can go croak. If there isn’t enough food, I’ll just shoot Katzman, eh? All fine and dandy!”

The door creaked behind him. He looked around. The room was empty. And the shot glasses were empty, and the flask was empty, and his chest felt empty, as if something large that was always there had been cut out of it. Maybe a tumor. Maybe his heart…

Already growing accustomed to this new sensation, Andrei walked over to the colonel’s bed, took the belt down off the nail, girded it on real good and tight, and shifted the holster around onto his stomach.

“A keepsake,” he told the snow-white pillow in a loud voice.