The Final Circle of Paradise

CHAPTER TWELVE

There was but one visitor in the automated cafe.

Barricaded behind bottles and hors d’oeuvres at a corner table sat a dark man of oriental cast, magnificently but outlandishly dressed. I took some yogurt and blintzes with sour cream and set to, glancing at him now and then. He ate and drank much and avidly, his face shiny with sweat, hot inside his ridiculous formal clothes. He sighed, leaning back in his chair and loosening his belt. The motion exposed a long yellow holster glistening in the sunlight under the clothing.

I was on my way into the last of the blintzes when he hailed me: “Hello,” he said. “Are you a native here?”

“No,” I said. “A tourist.”

“So that means you don’t understand anything either.”

I went to the bar, threw a juice cocktail together, and approached him.

“Why is it empty here?” he continued. He had a lively spare face and a bold gaze. “Where are the inhabitants? Why is everything closed up? Everyone is asleep, you can’t get any service.”

“You just arrived?”

“Yes.”

He pushed an empty plate away, moved up a full one, and gulped some light beer.

“Where are you from?” I asked. He glared at me menacingly, and I added quickly, “If it’s not a secret, of course.”

“No,” he said, “it’s not a secret,” and went back to his eating.

I finished the juice and got ready to leave. Then he said, “They live well, the dogs. Such food and as much as you want, and all for free.”

“Well, not quite for free,” I contradicted.

“Ninety dollars! Pennies! I’ll show them how to eat ninety dollars within three days!” His eyes stopped roving momentarily, “D-dogs!” he muttered and fell to again.

I was quite familiar with such types. They came from minuscule, totally milked kingdoms and prefectdoms, reduced to utter poverty, and greedily ate and drank, mindful of the hot dusty streets of their home towns, where in the niggardly ribbons of shade, moribund men and women lay dying and immobile, while children with distended bellies rummaged in the garbage piles of foreign consulates. They were surcharged with hatred and needed only two things — food and weapons. Food for their own gang, which was the opposition, and weapons to fight the other gang, which was in power. They were the most flaming patriots, who spoke hotly and effusively of their love for the people, but resolutely refused all help from without, because they loved nothing but their power and no one but themselves, and were ready in the name of the people and the victory of high principles to mortify the same people, right down to the last man, if necessary, with hunger and machine gun.

Microhitlers!

“Weapons? Food?” I asked.

He grew wary.

“Yes,” he said. “Food and weapons. Only without any silly conditions. And as free as possible. Or on credit. True patriots never have any money. While the ruling clique drowns in luxury…”

“Famine?” I asked.

“Anything you want. While you here swim in luxury.” He gazed at me with hatred. “The whole world is drowning in wealth and we alone are starving. But your hopes are in vain! The revolution cannot be stopped!”

“Yes,” I said. “And whom is the revolution against?”

“We are fighting the blood leeches of Boadshah! We are against corruption and debauchery of the ruling top layer, we are for freedom and true democracy. The people are with us, but they have to be fed. And you tell us that you’ll give us food only after we disarm. And even threaten intervention… What filthy, lying demagogy! What deception of the revolutionary masses! To disarm in the face of those bloodsuckers — that means to throw a hangman’s noose over the heads of all the true freedom fighters! We answer you — no! You will not deceive the people. Let Boadshah and his brutes disarm! Then we shall see what needs doing!”

“Yes,” I said. “But Boadshah also, in all probability, does not wish a noose thrown over his neck.”

He put the beer down savagely, and his hand moved toward the holster in a habitual gesture. But then he quickly caught himself.

“I should have known you don’t understand a damn thing,”

he said. “You who are well fed have grown drowsy from a full stomach, you are too conceited to understand us. You wouldn’t have dared to talk to me like that in the jungle.”

In the jungle, I would have talked differently to you, bandit, I thought, and said: “I really don’t understand many things. For instance, I don’t understand what will happen when you gain the upper hand.

Let us imagine that you have won, Boadshah has been hanged, if be, in his turn, hasn’t fled to seek food and weapons -”

“He won’t get away. He’ll get his just deserts. The revolutionary people will tear him to shreds. That’s when we’ll go to work. We will regain the territory seized from us by affluent neighbors, we will carry out the entire program which the lying Boadshah constantly shouts about to deceive the people… I’ll show them how to strike! They’ll learn about strikes with me on top — there’ll be no strikes! They’ll all go under arms and forward march! We will win and then…”

He shut his eyes and moaned a bit, shaking his head.

“And then you will be well fed, you will swim in luxury and sleep till noon?”

He laughed.

“I deserve that. The people deserve it. No one will dare reproach us. We will eat and drink as much as we wish, we will live in real houses, we will say to the people: now you are free — divert yourselves!”

“And don’t think about a thing,” I added. “But don’t you think that all that could come out badly for you?”

“Forget it,” he said. “That’s sheer demagogy. You are a demagogue. Also a dogmatist. We too have all kinds of dogmatists similar to yourself. Man, they say, will lose the meaning of life. No, we reply, man will lose nothing. Man will acquire and not lose. You have to feel the people. You have to be from the people yourself. The people don’t like sophists. What the hell for do I let myself be fed on by wood leeches and feed on worms myself?” Suddenly he smiled amiably. “You must have taken offense at me a bit, for calling you well fed and other things. Please don’t. Affluence is bad when you don’t have it, but your neighbor does. But achieved affluence — that’s a great thing! It’s worth fighting for. Everybody fought for it. It must be obtained with weapons in hand, and not traded for freedom and democracy.”

“So your final goal is still abundance? Just abundance?”

“Obviously! The final objective always is abundance. The difference is that we are choosy about the means to get it.”

“I have already grasped that. But what about man?”

“What do you mean, man?”

I did understand that it was futile to argue.

“You have never been here before?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Look into it, I said. This town gives excellent practical lessons in abundance.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“So far, I like it here.” Again he pushed away an empty plate and replaced it with a full one. “These hors d’oeuvres are strange to me… Everything is tasty and cheap… It’s enviable.” He swallowed a few forkfuls of salad and growled.

“We know that all great revolutionaries fought for abundance.

We don’t have time to theorize, but there is no need for it, anyway. There are enough theories without us. Furthermore, abundance is in no way threatening us. It won’t threaten us for quite a while yet. We have much more pressing problems.”

“To hang Boadshah,” I said.

“Yes — to begin with. Next we will need to do away with the dogmatists. I can perceive that even now. Next comes the realization of our legitimate claims. After that, something else will come up. And only then, and after many other things, will abundance arrive. I am an optimist, but I don’t believe I will live to see it. Don’t you worry — we’ll manage somehow. If we can stand hunger then we can take abundance for sure… The dogmatists prattle that abundance is not an end, but a means. We reply that every means was once an goal. Today, abundance is a goal. Tomorrow, perhaps it may become a means.”

I got up.

“Tomorrow may be too late,” I said. “It is incorrect of you to fall back on great revolutionaries. They would not have accepted your shibboleth: now you are free — enjoy yourselves. They spoke otherwise: now that you are free — work. After all, they never fought for abundance for the belly, they were interested in abundance for the soul and the mind.”

His hand twitched toward the holster again, and again he caught himself.

“A Marxist!” he said with astonishment. “But then again, you are a visitor. We have almost no Marxists, we take them and…”

I kept control of myself.

Passing by the window, I took another look at him. He sat with his back to the street and ate and ate, his elbows stuck out.

When I got home, the living room was already vacant. The youngsters had piled the bedsheets and pillows in the corner.

There was a note under the telephone on the desk. Written in a childish scrawl, it read: “Take care. She has plotted something. She was fussing in the bedroom.” I sighed and sat down in the armchair.

There was still an hour until the meeting with Oscar, assuming he came. There was no sense in going to sleep, but in addition, it might not be safe — Oscar could bring company, and come earlier than expected, possibly not through the door.

I got the pistol out of the suitcase, put in a clip, and dropped it in my side pocket. Next I climbed into the bar, brewed myself some coffee, and went back to the study.

I took the slug out of my radio and the one out of Rimeyer’s, lay them down in front of me on the table, and attempted again to recollect where indeed I had seen just such components and why I thought that I had seen them before and more than once. And then it came to me. I went into the bedroom and brought in the phonor. I didn’t even need a screwdriver. I took the case off the phonor, stuck my index finger under the odorizer horn, and, catching it with my finger nail, extracted a vacuum tubusoid FX-92-U, four outputs, static field, capacity equals two. Sold in consumer electronic stores at fifty cents each. In local patois — a slug.

It had to be, I thought. We are disoriented by conversations about a new drug. We are constantly derailed by talk about horrific new inventions. We have already made several similar blunders.

There was the time when Alhagana and Burris served up a complaint in the U.N. that the separatists were using a new type of weapon — freeze bombs. We threw ourselves furiously into a search for underground laboratories and even arrested two genuine underground inventors (sixteen and ninety-six years old, respectively). And then it turned out that the inventors were in no way connected, and the awful freeze bombs were acquired by the separatists in Munich from a refrigerator warehouse — and were in fact reject super-freezers. True, the effect of these super-freezers was indeed horrible. Used in conjunction with molecular detonators (widely used by undersea archaeologists in the Amazon for dispersing crocs and piranhas), the super-freezers were capable of instantaneous temperature depression of one hundred and fifty degrees centigrade over a radius of twenty meters. Afterward, we spent much effort indoctrinating ourselves with the concept that we should keep in mind that in our times, literally every month, masses of new inventions appear with the most peaceful of applications, but with the most unexpected side effects. These characteristics are often such that lawbreaking in the area of weapons manufacture and stockpiling becomes meaningless. We became extremely cautious about new types of armament, employed by various extremists, and only a year later got caught by another twist, when we went looking for a mysterious apparatus with which poachers lured pterodactyls from the Uganda Preserve at a great distance. We found a clever do-it-yourself adaptation of the “Up-down” toy in combination with a fairly generally available medical device.

And now we had caught slug — a combination of a standard radio with a standard tubusoid and a standard chemical and very common plumbing-supplied hot water.

To make a long story short, there would be no need to search for secret factories. We’d have to look for some very adroit and unprincipled speculators who sensed very delicately indeed that they found themselves in the Country of the Boob… They’d be like trichinae in a ham. Five or six enterprising self-seekers. An innocent cottage somewhere in the suburbs. Just go to a department store, buy the vacuum tubusoid for fifty cents, peel off the plastic wrapping, and place in an elegant box with a glassite cover. And then sell it for fifty marks — “only to you and only through friends.” True, there was still the inventor. Probably he was not alone, and most certainly he was not the only one… But probably they had not survived; for this was nothing like a lure for pterodactyls.

Anyway, was the matter really one of speculators? Let them sell another forty slugs, or a hundred. Even in the City of Boobs, people had to figure out in the end what it was all about. And when that happened, slug would spread like wildfire.

The first ones to see to that would be the moralists from the Joy of Living. They would be followed by Dr. Opir, who would sally forth and announce that according to scientific endings, slug was conducive to clarity of thought and was unsurpassed in the treatment of alcoholism and depression. In general, the future ideal was a vast trough filled with hot water. Then they would stop writing the word “slug” on the fences.

That’s who should be taken by the throat, I thought, if anybody. The trouble is not the profiteers. The trouble is that there exists this Country of the Boob, this filthy misconstruction. It has taken the shivers under its wing and can’t wait to legalize slug…

There was a knock on the door. Oscar came into the study, and he was not alone. With him was Matia himself, stocky, gray, with dark glasses and thick cane, as always, looking like a veteran who has lost his sight. Oscar was smirking self-satisfiedly.

“Hello, Ivan,” said Matia. “Meet your back-up, Oscar Pebblebridge, from the southwest section.”

We shook hands. What I have always disliked about our Security Council is the plethora of mossy traditions, and especially infuriating is the idiotic system of cross-investigation, due to which we are constantly tripping over each other’s sleuthing, busting each other’s mugs, and not uncommonly shooting each other with fair accuracy. I can hardly see that as serious work — more like adolescents playing at detectives. Let them go soak their heads in a swamp.

“I was going to take you in today,” confided Oscar. “Never in my life have I seen such a suspicious character.”

Without saying a word, I took the pistol out of my pocket, unloaded it, and threw it in the desk drawer. Oscar followed my actions with approval. I said, addressing Matia, “I guess that the investigation would simply collapse, without getting started, had I known about Oscar. But I must inform you that I almost maimed him yesterday.”

“I read you right,” said Oscar smugly.

Grunting, Matia lowered himself into the armchair.

“I can’t ever remember a situation,” he said, “when Ivan was pleased with everything. But conspiracy is the foundation of our business… Take a chair and sit down, both of you. You, Oscar, had no right to be maimed, and you, Ivan, had no right to be arrested. That’s how you should regard it. And what have you got here?” he said, taking off his dark glasses to look at the slugs, “Taking up radio as a hobby in between your work? Laudable, laudable!”

It was evident that they didn’t know a thing. Oscar was leafing through his notebook, where everything was encrypted in his own personal code, and was apparently preparing himself to make a report, while Matia scanned over the slugs with his fleshy nose, holding the glasses aloft in his hand. There was something symbolic in this spectacle.

“And so, agent Zhilin is enriching his leisure with radio technology,” continued Matia, restoring his glasses and leaning back in his chair. “He has lots of free time, he has switched to a four-hour day… And bow do you stand on the question of the meaning of life, agent Zhilin? It appears you may have found it. I hope it won’t be necessary to take you away like agent Rimeyer?”

“It won’t be required,” I said. “I had not enough time to become addicted. Did Rimeyer tell you anything?”

“But of course not,” he said with vast sarcasm. “Why should he do that? He was ordered to find the drug, and he did, and he used it, and now he apparently considers his duty discharged. He became an addict himself, don’t you see. He is silent. He is loaded with this brew up to his ears, and it’s useless to talk to him! He raves that he has murdered you and constantly asks for his radio.” Matia stopped short and gazed at the radios. “Strange,” he said and looked at me. “However, I like orderliness. Oscar got here first, and he has certain deductions both about the goodies and the conduct of the operation. Let’s begin with him.”

I looked at Oscar.

“About what operation?”

“The devil knows,” said Matia. “The raiding of the center. You haven’t located the center yet?”

The hunt is on, I thought, and said, “No, I didn’t. A center I haven’t latched on to. But -”

“All in good order, in proper order,” said Matia severely and banged the table with the flat of his hand. “Oscar, you may begin, and as for you, Ivan, you listen attentively and make your deductions. If you are still capable, that is.”

Oscar began. Obviously he was a good worker. He moved fast, energetically, and purposefully. True, Rimeyer had twisted him around his finger as well as he had me.

Nevertheless, Oscar had been able to grasp much in spite of it.

He understood that the sought—for “goodies” were known locally as “slug.” Very rapidly he had grasped the connection between slug and Devon. He divined that neither the Fishers, nor the Perches, nor the Sorrowers had any relation to our problem. He had deduced with superb insight that in this town it was practically impossible to hide any secret. He had even been able to insinuate himself into the confidence of the Intels, and had established beyond any doubt that there were only two truly secret societies — the Art Patrons and the Intels. Since the Art Patrons could be eliminated, that left only the Intels…

“It was not contrary to the conviction which I had formed,” said Oscar, “that the only people with access to laboratories and capable of conducting scientific or quasi-scientific research were the students and professors in the university. It’s true that the factories in the city also have laboratories. There are only four of them, and I have investigated them all. These laboratories are stringently specialized and are loaded to the limit with ongoing work. As the factories work around the clock, there is no basis whatsoever to postulate that the industrial labs could become centers of slug manufacture. On the other hand, out of the seven university labs, two are obviously surrounded with an atmosphere of mystery. I was unable to determine what goes on in them, but I spotted three students, who, I believe, should know for sure…”

I listened to him intently, amazed at how much he had been able to accomplish here, but it was already all too clear to me where his main error lay. I could see he was following a false trail, and alongside of that, there grew within me a vague feeling of an even more significant error, of a most important error, the error in the underlying premises of the Council.

“I arrived at the visualization,” he continued, “of a gangsterlike organization of the vertical type with rigorously separated functions in decentralized sections. The production section is involved in the manufacture and perfection of the slug… I should inform you that slug, whatever it may be, is being perfected: I was able to establish that in the beginning.

Devon was not employed at all… Next, the marketing section is concerned with expanding the slug distribution, while the strong-arm section terrorizes the population and interdicts all debate on that topic… The intimidation of the people…”

Now I understood it all.

“Just a minute, Oscar,” I said. “Can you guarantee that in the entire city there are only two secret organizations?”

“Yes,” he said. “Only the Art Patrons and the Intels.”

“Please continue, Oscar,” said Matia with displeasure. “I would ask you not to interrupt, Ivan.”

“Sorry,” I said. Oscar continued to talk, but I was no longer listening. Something flared in my mind. The traditional initial model for all our undertakings, with its invariant axiom predicating the existence of a ramified organization of evildoers, had been shattered into dust, and I was only amazed that I had failed heretofore to recognize its inane complexity in the context of this simple-minded country. There were no secret shops guarded by gloomy persons with brass knuckles, there were no wary, unprincipled businessmen, there were no traveling salesmen with double-walled shirt collars stuffed with contraband, and it was quite for nothing that Oscar was drafting the elegant chart of squares and circles, connected by a confusion of lines, and inscribed with the words “center,”

“staff,” and numerous question marks. There was nothing to demolish and be and no one to send off to Baffin Land… But there was modern industry involved in everyday trade, there were state stores where slugs were sold for fifty cents apiece, and there were — but only in the beginning one or two individuals not devoid of inventiveness and dying of inactivity and thirsting for new sensations. And there was the medium-sized country where, once upon a time, abundance and affluence were the end to be attained, and they never did become the means to another end. And that was all that was needed.

Someone inserted a slug into a radio by mistake and lay down in the bath to relax and maybe listen to some good music or to hear the latest news — and it started. The news oozed and remnants of phonors found their way into the garbage ducts, then someone figured out that slugs could be obtained not only from phonors, but could simply be bought in stores. Someone was inspired to use aromatic salts and someone employed Devon.

People started to die in their baths from nervous exhaustion, and the statistical department of the Security Council submitted a top secret report to the Presidium. It became apparent at once that all such deaths occurred with people who had come here as tourists. And furthermore, that there were far more such deaths in this country than anywhere else on the planet. As so often happens, a false theory was constructed on well-verified facts, and we, one after another, well schooled in conspiracy, were sent here to uncover the secret gang of dealers in a new and unknown drug, and we arrived here and did stupid things. But, as always, no labor goes for naught, and if you must look for the guilty, then all were guilty, from the mayor to Rimeyer, and if so, then no one was guilty, and now we have to -

“Ivan,” said Matia irritably, “are you asleep?”

They were both looking at me. Oscar was extending me his notebook with the diagrams. I took the notebook and threw it on the table.

“Listen,” I said. “Oscar has done wonders, of course, but we have come a cropper again! Oscar, you have seen such a lot, but you understood nothing. If there are any people in this land who hate slug, it’s the Intels. The Intels are not gangsters, they are desperate men and patriots. They have but one aim — to stir this bog. By any means. To give this city some kind of purpose, to force it away from the trough They are sacrificing themselves, do you understand? They invite fire upon themselves, they are attempting to arouse the town to come sort of common emotion, even if it has to be hatred. Can it be you haven’t heard of the tear gas, the shooting up of the shivers? They are not making slug in the laboratories, they are building bombs and cooking tear gas… and generally breaking the laws on weapons technology. They are preparing a putsch for the twenty-eighth, but as for slug — here it is!”

I shoved one at each of them, and simultaneously expounded everything I thought on the subject.

At first, they listened to me in disbelief. Then they stared at the slugs, not taking their eyes off them until I’d finished, and when I did, they were quiet for quite a while.

Matia held his slug as though it were a buzzing wasp. There was displeasure written on his face.

“Vacuum tubusoid… Hmmm… In fact… and radios…

there is something to it.”

Matia stuck the slug in his shirt pocket and announced decisively, “There is nothing in it. That is, of course, I am very pleased with you, Ivan, since you have apparently found that which was needed, but your work is in the Council and not with the Commission of World Problems. They adore philosophy there, and haven’t done a single useful thing to date. As for you, you have been working with us for ten years now, but you still haven’t grasped the simple truth: if there is a crime, there must be a criminal.”

’That’s not true,” I said.

“That is true!” said Matia. “Don’t start a debate with me!

You are eternally debating!… Be quiet, Oscar. It’s my turn to talk. I am asking you, Ivan, what is the worth of your version?

What do you propose to do? But be concrete, please! Be concrete!”

“Concretely…” I faltered.

True enough, my version did not suit them.

They probably didn’t even consider it a version.

For them it was just philosophizing. They were men, so to say, of resolute action, knights of immediate decisive measures., They let nothing slide. They cut through knots and demounted Damocles’ swords. They made rapid decisions, and having made them, they no longer doubted. They didn’t know how to be otherwise. That was their world-view — and I was the only one to consider that their time had passed. Patience, I thought. I am going to need an awful lot of patience. Suddenly, I understood that life’s logic was again ripping me away from my best comrades, and that now it would be especially hard for me, since the resolution of this argument would take a long time, a very long time… They were both looking at me.

“Concretely,” I repeated. “Concretely I suggest a plan for the development and spread of a humanistic viewpoint in this country.”

Oscar grimaced with distaste, and Matia said biliously: “Nah! I am talking seriously.”

“So am I. What we need is not detectives, nor squads armed with machine pistols.”

“We need a decision!” said Matia, “not conversations, but decisions!”

’That’s precisely what I am proposing — a decision.”

Matia reddened “We have to save people,” he said. “Souls we can save after we save the people… Don’t annoy me, Ivan!”

“While you are restructuring world-views,” said Oscar, “people will be dying or turning into idiots.”

I didn’t want to argue, but said anyway, “As long as world-views are not restructured, people will be dying and turning into idiots, and no squads will help. Remember Rimeyer!”

“Rimeyer forgot his duty,” raged Matia.

“Exactly,” said I.

Matia slammed his mouth shut and, tearing off his glasses, was silent for a while, his eyes rotating angrily. He was, without a doubt, a man of iron; you could actually watch turn drive his rage inward. In a minute he was entirely calm and smiling placidly.

“Yes,” he said. “It seems that I am forced to admit that intelligence as a social institution has regressed to the piteous end. Apparently we destroyed the last of the true operatives in the time of the last putsches. “Knife” -

Dannziger; “Bamboo” — Savada; “Doll” — Grover; “Ram” -

Boas… True, they were bought and they were sold, they had no country, they were scum, lumpens, but they worked! “Sirius” -

Haram… worked for four intelligences and was a scoundrel. He was a filthy animal. But if he gave information, it was real information, clear, precise, and timely. I can recollect ordering him hung without the slightest pity, but when I look at my current co-workers, I can understand what a loss that was… Granted, a man can fail in the end and become a drug addict, as “Bamboo” Savada did finally. But why write lying reports? Rather resign, excuse yourself, don’t write any reports at all… I arrive in this town in the profound conviction that I know it through and through, because I have had here for ten years an experienced, proved, resident agent.

And suddenly I determine that I know precisely nothing. Every local kid knows who the Fishers are. But I don’t know. I know only that the KVS Society which occupied itself with about the same things as the Fishers was disbanded and outlawed three years ago. I know this from the reports of the resident. But at the local police I am informed that the VAL Society was formed two years ago, which I did not learn from the resident’s reports. I am employing a simplified example, since I really don’t give a damn about the Fishers, but this becomes transformed into a general style of work. Reports are delayed, reports lie, reports misinform… in the end reports are simply invented. One man openly resigns from the Council and doesn’t consider it incumbent upon him to so inform his superior. He has enough, you see; he had intentions to communicate but somehow couldn’t find the time… Another, instead of fighting the drug problem, becomes an addict himself… And the third philosophizes.”

He nodded at me with regretful bitterness.

“Understand me correctly, Ivan,” he continued. “I am not opposed to philosophy. But philosophy is one thing and our work altogether another. Judge for yourself, Ivan. If there is no secret headquarters, if we are faced with a deluge of do-it-yourself enterprise, then why all the secretiveness? All this conspiratorial atmosphere? Why is slug enveloped in such mystery? I allow that Rimeyer is silent because of pangs of conscience in general and specifically on your account, Ivan.

But the rest? Slug is not illegal; everyone knows about it and yet everyone keeps it a secret. Oscar, here, doesn’t philosophize; he postulates that the inhabitants are simply terrorized. I can understand that. And what do you postulate, Ivan?”

“In your pocket,” I said, “there is a slug. Go in the bathroom. There’s Devon on the shelf — one tablet orally, four in the water. There’s some whiskey in the medicine chest. Oscar and I will wait. And then you can tell us aloud, so we can hear, we your comrades in work and your underlings, about your sensations and experiences. And we — better it should be Oscar — should listen, but as for me, I think I’ll leave.”

Matia put on his glasses and stared at me.

“You are implying that I won’t tell? You propose that I, too, will be derelict in my duty?”

“What you will learn will have no relation whatsoever to your duty. That you will renege on subsequently. As did Rimeyer. Comrades, this is slug. It’s a cute device, which awakens fantasy and directs it where it will, particularly where you yourself subconsciously — and I mean subconsciously — would like to direct it. The further you are removed from the animal, the more inoffensive would slug be, but the closer to the animal, the more you would be impelled to adhere to the conspiratorial way. The animals themselves are altogether silent. They just know how to press the lever.”

“What lever?”

I explained about the rats to them.

“Did you try it yourself?” asked Matia.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“As you can see, I tend to silence.”

Matia sibilated for some time and then said, “Well, I am no nearer to the animal than you are. How do you put it in?”

I loaded the radio and handed it to him. Oscar was following all this with interest.

“God be with me,” said Matia, “Where is your bath? I’ll wash after my trip while I’m at it.”

He locked himself in, and we could hear him dropping things.

“Strange affair,” said Oscar.

“It’s really not an affair,” I contradicted. “It’s a piece of history, Oscar, and you would like to fit it into a file and tie it with a ribbon. But this is no gangster business. It should be obvious to a hedgehog, as Yurkovsky used to say.”

“Who?”

“Yurkovsky, Vladimir Sergeyevitch. There was such a renowned planetologist. I worked with him.”

“Aah,” said Oscar, “By the way, on the plaza by the Hotel Olympic there is a monument to a Yurkovsky.”

“The very same man.”

“Really?” said Oscar. “On the other hand, it’s quite possible. However, the monument was not put up because he was a renowned planetologist. It’s simply that for the first time in the history of the city, he broke the electronic roulette bank.

It was decided to immortalize such a feat.”

“I expected something of the sort,” I murmured. I felt depressed.

The shower began to hiss in the bathroom, and there was a frightful roar from Matia, At first, I decided that he turned on ice water instead of warm, but he kept yelling and then began to curse in the most horrendous terms. Oscar and I exchanged glances. He was generally calm, interpreting this as the typical action of slug, and his face exhibited a compassionate expression. The latch rattled wildly, the door flew open with a crash. Bare heels slapped in the bedroom, and a naked Matia rolled into the study.

“Are you some kind of an idiot?” he bellowed at me. “What sort of filthy trick is this?”

I went numb. Matia resembled a grotesque zebra. His well-fed body was covered with poison-green vertical stripes.

He reared and stamped his feet, spraying emerald drops. When we regained our composure and investigated the site of the accident, we learned that the shower head had been stuffed with a sponge saturated with a green dye. I remembered Len’s note and guessed that Vousi was the culprit. It took a long while to restore a normal atmosphere. Matia viewed the incident as a boorish joke and an inadmissible disregard of subordinate discipline and behavior. Oscar horse-laughed. I scrubbed Matia with a brush and explained. Then Matia announced that from now on he wouldn’t trust anyone and would try out slug when he got home. He dressed and went into conference with Oscar on the plans for blockading the city.

I was cleaning up in the bath and thinking that with this, my work in the Council was coming to an end, and another kind of work was beginning — which I did not know how to begin. I would have liked to include myself in the blockade planning, not because I considered it necessary, but because it was so simple, so much more simple than to return to people their souls which had been devoured by affluence, and to teach each one to think of world problems in the same way as his own personal ones.

“Isolate this pus bag from the rest of the world, isolate it totally, that’s the total of our philosophy,” orated Matia.

That was aimed at me. But perhaps not even me. For Matia was a brilliant mind. He understood too well that isolation was always a defense, but here we had to attack. But he knew how to advance only with squads, and this was embarrassing to him.

To rescue. For how long would you need rescuing? When would you learn to rescue yourselves? Why were you eternally harkening to priests, fascists, demagogues, and imbecile Opirs?

Why didn’t you want to exert your brains? Why did you resist thinking so? Why couldn’t you understand that the world is vast, complex, and fascinating? Why was everything simple and boring to you? In what way did your mind differ from the mind of Rabelais, Swift, Lenin, Einstein, Makarenko, Hemingway, and Strogoff? Someday I would grow tired of all this. Someday when I had no more strength and conviction. For I was similar to you. But I wanted to help you, and you didn’t want to help me…

Reg and Len came over after school, and Len said, “We have decided, Ivan. We will go to the Gobi Central.” He had red fuzz on his lip and huge red hands, and I could see that it divas he who had thought up the Gobi trip, and quite recently — not more than ten minutes ago. Reg, as usual, was silent, chewing on a blade of grass and placidly studying me with his calm gray eyes. He has become altogether a square, I thought, and said, “Wonderful book, isn’t it?” “Yes, indeed,” said Len.

"We understood at once where we should go.” Reg was quiet.

"Heat and stench are suspended in the shadow of these hard laboring dragons,” I said from memory. “They devour everything under them — the ancient Mongolian prayer gate, the bones of a two-humped beast fallen in some sand storm…”

“Yes,” said Len, while Reg went on chewing his blade of grass.

“Every time,” I continued (now from Ichin-dagli), “that the sun arrives at a mathematically precise required position, a strange mirage blossoms out in the East — of a strange city with white towers which no one has yet seen in reality. “ “One should see that with his own eyes,” said Len, and laughed. “Friend Len,” I said, “it’s too fascinating and therefore too simple. You will see that it’s too simple yourself and it will become an unpleasant disappointment.” No, I hadn’t said it right. “Friend Len,” I said, “what sort of a mirage is that? Here is one.

Seven years ago, in your mother’s house, I saw a truly marvelous mirage: both of you standing before me almost grown up…” No — I was saying that for myself, not for them. It should be said differently. “Friend Len,” I said, “seven years ago you explained to me that your people were accursed. We came here and removed the curse from you and Reg and from many other children who had no parents. And now it’s your turn to remove, the curse, which…"

It will be very difficult, but I’ll explain it to them.

One way or another, I’ll get it across. We have known from childhood how to remove the curses on the barricades and on construction sites and in laboratories, and you will remove the last of the curses, you will be the future teachers and educators. In the last war — the most bloodless and the most difficult for its soldiers.

Upstairs Vousi screeched and Len started to cry piteously.

Oscar’s voice boomed in the study. How well off he is, I thought. Simple: slug is bad, harmful, unnatural. Therefore, it must be destroyed, forbidden by law, and then you must watch closely that the law is strictly enforced. Only Matia is smarter than that, because he is older and more experienced.

Matia can still be pulled over to my side. My word doesn’t mean anything to him, but others will be found to whom he will listen… How wonderful that I can now cry out to the whole world and be heard by millions of like-thinkers!

And then I thought that I would not leave this place. I had been here only three days. It could not be that there was no one here who would be with us. No one who hated all this with a deadly hatred, who wanted to blast this dull sated world out of its stasis. Such people always existed and always will.

Perhaps that bibliophile driver or that tall, harsh one of the Intels… and who knew how many more. They stumbled about as though they were blind. We would do everything in our power to help them so that they would not waste their anger on trifles.

It was our place to be here now. And my place, too.

What a labor lies ahead, I thought, what a task! For the time being, I didn’t know where to begin in this Country of the Boob, caught unprepared in a flood of affluence, but I knew that I wouldn’t leave here as long as the immigration laws permitted. And when they stopped permitting it, I would break them…