The Inhabited Island

13

His first shot shattered one of its caterpillar tracks, and for the first time in more than twenty years, it abandoned its well-worn rut, in the process wrenching up chunks of concrete, then smashed its way into the thickets of the forest and began slowly slewing around on the spot, crunching heavily through the bushes with its broad forehead and brushing aside the shuddering tree trunks. When it displayed its immense, dirty stern with a sheet of iron dangling on rusty rivets, Zef fired neatly and precisely so that he wouldn’t—God forbid!—hit the atomic boiler, sending a blast charge deep into the engine, into the muscles, sinews, and nerve ganglia, and it gasped in an iron voice, belched a cloud of incandescent smoke from out of its articulated joints, and stopped forever. But something carried on living in its vile, armored belly. Some nerves or other that had survived continued to transmit meaningless signals; emergency response systems kept switching on and immediately switching off, hissing and spitting out foam. That something continued flaccidly palpitating, feebly scrabbling with its surviving caterpillar track, and up on top of the dying dragon the peeling latticework barrel of its rocket launcher continued rising up and sinking back down in meaningless menace, like the abdomen of a splatted wasp.

Zef watched this death agony for a few seconds, then turned and walked into the forest, dragging the grenade launcher along by its strap, and Maxim and Wild Boar set off after him. When they emerged into a quiet clearing that Zef must have spotted earlier on the way here, they all collapsed into the grass. “Let’s have a smoke,” said Zef.

He made a roll-up for the one-handed man, gave him a light, and lit up himself. Maxim lay there with his chin propped on his hands, still watching through the sparse trees as the iron dragon died, pitifully jangling some final gear-wheels or other, and whistling as it released jets of radioactive steam from its lacerated innards.

“That’s the way—that’s the only way,” Zef said in a patronizing tone of voice. “And if you do it any other way, I’ll box your ears.”

“Why?” asked Maxim. “I wanted to stop it.”

“Because,” Zef replied, “the grenade could ricochet into the rocket, and then we’d be dead meat.”

“I was aiming at the caterpillar tread,” said Maxim.

“But you have to aim at its butt,” said Zef. He stretched. “And in general, while you’re still a greenhorn, don’t go sticking your nose anywhere first. Not unless I ask you to. You got that?”

“Yes,” said Maxim. He wasn’t interested in all these subtle points of Zef’s. And he wasn’t really very interested in Zef himself. He was interested in Wild Boar. But as always, Wild Boar remained indifferently silent, resting his artificial hand on the scruffy housing of the mine detector. Everything was the same as it always was. And nothing was the way Mak would have liked it to be.

When the newly arrived educatees were lined up in front of the bunkhouses a week earlier, Zef had walked straight up to Maxim and taken him into his 134th Sappers’ Unit. Maxim had been delighted. He immediately recognized that massive, fiery-red beard and the square, stocky figure, and it gave him a good feeling to have been recognized in that stifling crowd of check coveralls, in which nobody gave a damn for anybody else and nobody was even interested in anybody else. In addition, Maxim had every reason to suppose that Zef—the formerly famous psychiatrist Allu Zef, an educated, cultured individual, and a total contrast with the semicriminal riffraff crammed into the convict car—was here because of his politics and was connected in some way with the underground. And when Zef led him into the bunkhouse and pointed to a place on the bunks beside one-handed Wild Boar, Maxim thought that his fate here had definitely been decided.

Very soon, however, he realized he had been wrong. Wild Boar didn’t want to make conversation. After listening to Maxim’s hastily whispered story about what had happened to his group, the demolition of the tower, and the trial, he mumbled through a yawn, “Stranger things than that happen,” and lay down, turning his face away. Maxim felt cheated. And then Zef clambered up onto the bunks. “I’ve just gobbled a real gutful,” he informed Maxim, burping loudly with his stomach gurgling, and then attempted, in a crude, pushy style, to drag all the names and meeting places out of Maxim. Maybe he had once been a famous scientist, an educated and cultured individual. Maybe—and even probably—he used to have some kind of connection with the underground. But at that moment he produced the impression of a run-of-the-mill stooge with an overstuffed gut who, for want of anything else to do, had decided to work on a stupid greenhorn before turning in. Maxim only managed to shake him off with a serious effort. After Zef suddenly started snoring and snorting in a satisfied, well-fed tone, Maxim lay there for a long time, unable to sleep, recalling how many times he had been deceived by people and circumstances here.

His nerves were at the breaking point. He recalled the hideous, fraudulent trial, thoroughly rehearsed in advance, arranged in detail even before the group had received the order to attack the tower, and the written denunciations of some bastard who knew everything about the group and maybe was even a member of the group, and the movie that was shot from the tower during the attack, and his own feeling of shame when he recognized himself on the screen, blazing away with his automatic rifle at those spotlights—no, at those movie floodlights illuminating the set for that appalling production… It was repulsively stifling in the hermetically sealed bunkhouse, the parasites were biting, the educatees were deliriously raving, and down in the farthest corner the privileged inmates were playing a passionate game of cards by the light of an improvised candle, abusing each other in harsh, vehement voices.

And the next day even the forest deceived Maxim. He couldn’t take a single step there without running into iron: dead, rusted-through iron; iron that was just lying in wait, ready to kill at any moment; iron that was furtively stirring, taking aim; iron that was moving, blindly and senselessly plowing up the remains of the roads. The earth and the grass gave off a smell of rust, radioactive pools had accumulated at the bottoms of gullies, the birds didn’t sing but hoarsely lamented, as if bewailing their death agony, there weren’t any animals, and there wasn’t even any sylvan repose—on their right and on their left explosions erupted and rumbled, grayish-blue fumes swirled and eddied among the branches, and gusts of wind brought the harsh roaring of exhausted engines…

And so it went on, day and night, night and day. In the daytime they went out into the forest, which wasn’t a forest but an old fortified area. It was literally crawling with automated combat devices—self-propelled guns, rockets on caterpillar tracks, flamethrowers, and gas projectors—all of which still hadn’t died yet after more than twenty years. It was still living its own unnecessary mechanical life, still taking aim, vectoring in, and belching forth lead, fire, and death, and all of it had to be strangled, blown up, and killed in order to clear a corridor for the construction of more radiation towers. At night Wild Boar remained as taciturn as ever, while Zef pestered Maxim with questions again and again, switching approaches between stupidly forthright and incredibly subtle and cunning. And there was the coarse food, and the educatees’ strange songs, and the Guards beating someone’s face in, and twice a day everyone in the bunkhouses and the forest writhed in agony from the radiation attacks, and hanged fugitives dangled in the wind… Day and night… day and night…

“Why did you want to stop it?” Wild Boar suddenly asked.

Maxim hastily sat down. This was the first question the one-handed man had asked him. “I wanted to take a look at how it was made.”

“Did you want to escape?”

“No, not that. But it’s a tank, after all, a battle machine…”

“What would you want with a tank?” Wild Boar asked. He spoke as if the red-haired stooge weren’t there.

“I don’t know,” said Maxim. “I still need to think about that. Are there a lot of them here?”

“Yes, a lot,” the red-haired stooge butted in. “There are lots of tanks here, and there have always been lots of fools here too.” He yawned. “The number of times it’s been tried already. They climb in, rummage around and rummage around, and then give up. And there was one fool—someone like you—who simply blew himself up.”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have blown myself up,” Maxim coolly said. “It’s not a complicated mechanism.”

“But still, what would you want with it?” the one-handed man asked. He was smoking, lying on his back, holding the roll-up in his artificial fingers. “Let’s suppose you get it going. Then what?”

“A break-out across the bridge,” Zef chuckled.

“And why not?” asked Maxim. He had no idea at all how to behave. This redheaded character didn’t seem to be a stooge after all. Massaraksh, why were they suddenly pestering him like this?

“You’d never get as far the bridge,” said the one-handed man. “They’d gun you down thirty-three times over. And even if you did reach it, you’d see that the bridge has been demolished.”

“How about across the bottom of the river?”

‘The river’s radioactive,” Zef said, and spat. “If it were a decent sort of river, now, you wouldn’t need any tanks. Just swim across it anywhere at all—the banks aren’t guarded.” He spat again. “But in that case, they would be guarded. And, so, young man, stop kicking up dust. You’re stuck here for the long term, so get used to it. Adapt and things will work out. But if you don’t listen to your elders, you could even find yourself beholding the World Light this very day.”

“Escaping’s not difficult,” said Maxim. “I could escape right now—”

“Well, aren’t you something!” Zef admiringly exclaimed.

“…and if you intend to carry on playing the conspirator…” Maxim continued, pointedly addressing only Wild Boar, but Zef interrupted him again.

“I intend to fulfill the daily norm,” he declared, getting up. “Otherwise they won’t let us feed our faces today. Let’s go!”

He walked off ahead, striding between the trees with a waddling gait, and Maxim asked the one-handed man, “Is he really a political prisoner?”

The one-handed man cast a quick glance at Maxim and said, “Come on, how can you ask that?”

They set off after Zef, trying to tread in his footsteps. Maxim brought up the rear. “What’s he in here for?”

“Crossing the street at the wrong place,” the one-handed man said, and once again Maxim’s desire to talk evaporated.

Before they had gone even a hundred paces, Zef gave the command “Halt!” and work began. “Get down!” Zef roared. He flung himself down flat on the ground, and the thick tree ahead of them revolved with a long screech, thrust a long, slim gun barrel out from inside itself, wiggled it from side to side as if taking aim, and started droning; there was a click, and a little puff of yellow smoke lazily crept out of the black muzzle. “It’s defunct,” Zef said in a brisk tone, and got up first, dusting off his trousers. They blew up the gun tree.

After that there was a minefield, then a hill with a machine gun trap, which wasn’t defunct and kept them pinned down on the ground for a long time, setting the forest ringing with its roaring. Then they ended up in a genuine jungle of barbed wire and barely managed to scramble through it, and when they finally did get through it, something opened fire on them from above, and everything on all sides started exploding and burning. Maxim couldn’t understand a thing, the one-handed man calmly lay there facedown, and Zef fired his grenade launcher up into the sky and suddenly yelled, “Follow me, move it!” They ran, and flames suddenly flared up where they had just been. Zef swore terrible oaths and the one-handed man laughed. Then they clambered into a dense thicket, but suddenly something started whistling and wheezing, and clouds of greenish gas with a repulsive smell started billowing down through the branches, and again they had to run, scrambling through the bushes, and Zef swore again, and the one-handed man agonizingly vomited…

Zef eventually got tired and announced a break. They lit a campfire, and Maxim, as the junior comrade, prepared to cook lunch by boiling up soup out of canned food in the old, familiar cooking pot. Zef and the one-handed man, both grubby and tattered, lay right there beside him, smoking. Wild Boar looked worn out; he was already old and found all of this harder going than the others.

“The mind boggles,” said Maxim. “How did we manage to lose a war with so much weaponry per square yard?”

“What makes you think we lost?” Zef lazily asked.

“Well, we didn’t win,” said Maxim. “Victors don’t live like this.”

“In modern war there are no victors,” the one-handed man remarked. “You’re right, of course. We did lose the war. Everybody lost this war. Only the Unknown Fathers won it.”

“The Unknown Fathers have it tough too,” said Maxim, stirring the soup.

“Yes,” Zef said in a serious voice. “Sleepless nights and agonized pondering on the fate and fortunes of their people… Weary and benign, all-seeing and all-understanding… Massaraksh, it’s a long time since I read any newspapers, I’ve forgotten what comes next…”

“Faithful and benign,” the one-handed man corrected him. “Totally dedicated to progress and the struggle against chaos.”

“I’ve grown unused to words like that,” said Zef. “Around here, there’s more of ‘lousy mug’ and ‘ugly snout’… Hey, kid, whatever your name is…”

“Maxim.”

“Yes, right… You keep stirring, Mak, keep stirring. If it burns, you’re in trouble!”

Maxim kept stirring. And then Zef announced that it was time, he couldn’t bear to wait any longer. They ate the soup in complete silence.

Maxim could sense that something had changed, something would be said today. But after lunch the one-handed man lay down again and started looking up at the sky, and Zef muttered unintelligibly as he took the pot and started mopping the bottom of it with a thick crust of bread. “I feel like shooting something…” he muttered. “I want to really gorge myself, it’s like I haven’t eaten at all… just aggravated my appetite…” Feeling awkward, Maxim tried to strike up a conversation about the hunting in these parts, but no one backed him up. The one-handed man lay with his eyes closed and seemed to be sleeping. After hearing out Maxim’s comments, Zef merely growled, “What kind of hunting can there be here? Everything’s polluted, radioactive,” and he also collapsed onto his back.

Maxim sighed, took the cooking pot, and plodded toward a stream that he could hear somewhere close by. The water in the stream was clear; it looked so pure and delectable, it made Maxim really want to take a drink, and he scooped up a handful. Unfortunately, he realized he definitely couldn’t wash the cooking pot here, and it would be a bad idea to drink the water too—the stream was distinctly radioactive. Maxim squatted down, placed the cooking pot beside him, and started pondering.

First he thought about Rada for some reason, about how she always washed the dishes after a meal and wouldn’t let him help, on the absurd excuse that it was a woman’s job. He remembered that she loved him and felt proud, because no woman had ever loved him before. He wanted very badly to see Rada, and then immediately, with supreme inconsistency, thought what a good thing it was that she wasn’t here. This was no place for even the most obnoxious of men; they ought to herd a thousand cyberjanitors in here. Or maybe just atomize all these forests with everything in them and cultivate new, cheerful ones—or even gloomy ones, but pure with the gloominess of nature.

Then he remembered that he had been banished here in perpetuity, and felt amazed by the naïveté of those who had banished him without making him promise anything, who had imagined that he would voluntarily live here and even help them set up a line of radiation towers through these forests. In the convict car they had told him that the forests stretched southward for hundreds of miles, and the war technology was still there, even in the desert… Ah no, I’m not going to hang around here. Massaraksh, only yesterday I was knocking these towers down, and today I’m supposed to clear the sites for them? I’ve had enough of this nonsense.

Wild Boar doesn’t trust me. He trusts Zef but not me. And I don’t trust Zef, but apparently I’m wrong about that. Probably I seem as suspiciously nosy to Wild Boar as Zef seems to me… Well, OK, Wild Boar doesn’t trust me, so I’m on my own again. Of course, I could hope to run into General or Hoof, only that’s just too unlikely; they say there are more than a million educatees here, and this is a vast region. No, no, there’s no point in hoping to meet anyone like that… Of course, I could try to cobble together a group of strangers, but—massaraksh—I have to be honest with myself: I’m not suited to that. I’m not suited to that just yet, that is. I’m too trusting…

But hang on, let’s define the goal first. What do I want? He spent several minutes clarifying his goal. It turned out as follows: Overthrow the Unknown Fathers. If they’re military men, let them serve in the army, and if they’re financial experts, let them deal with financial matters, whatever that might mean. Establish a democratic government—he had a more or less clear idea of what a democratic government was, and he was even aware that a republic would be bourgeois democratic at first. It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but it would at least make it possible to put an end to lawlessness and eliminate the senseless expenditure on the towers and preparations for war.

However, he honestly admitted that he only had a clear idea of the first point of his program: the overthrow of tyranny. His thoughts were pretty vague on what came after that. And what was more, he wasn’t even certain that the broad masses of the people would actually support his idea of overthrowing authority. The Unknown Fathers were absolutely obvious liars and scoundrels, but for some reason they enjoyed unchallenged popularity with the people.

OK, he decided, let’s not look so far ahead. Let’s stick with the first point and take a look at what stands between me and the fat necks of the Unknown Fathers. In the first place, the armed forces—the excellently trained Guards and the army, about which all I know is that my Gai is serving in a penal company (what a strange expression!) somewhere or other. In the second place—and this is more substantial—the actual anonymity of the Unknown Fathers. Who are they? Where do I look for them? Where do they come from, where do they reside, how do they become Unknown Fathers? He tried to recall how things had been on Earth in the age of revolutions and dictatorships… . Massaraksh, all I remember are the main dates, the most important names, the most basic alignment of forces—but I need details, analogies, precedents… Take fascism, for instance—what were things like then? I remember how horrible it was reading about it and hearing about it. That Himmler was some repulsive kind of bloodsucking spider… But hang on, that means it wasn’t an anonymous government… Yeeeah, I don’t remember much. But it was so long ago, wasn’t it, and it was so abhorrent, and who could have known that I’d end up in a mess like this?

They ought to send the guys from Galactic Security or the Institute of Experimental History here—they’d figure out what’s what soon enough. Maybe I should try to construct a transmitter? He sadly laughed, remembering that he had already thought about building a transmitter here—and right here in this very area, somewhere not far away… No, I’ll obviously have to rely on nobody but myself. OK. There’s only one weapon against an army: another army. And the weapon against anonymity and mystery is intelligence work. It all turns out to be very simple…

In any case, I have to get away from here. Of course, I’ll try to get some kind of group together, but if that doesn’t work out, I’ll go on my own… And a tank is a definite must. The weapons here are worth a hundred armies. They’re a bit battered after twenty years, it’s true, and they’re automated, but I’ll just have to try to adapt them… Does Wild Boar really still not trust me? he thought, almost in despair, grabbed the cooking pot, and ran back to the campfire.

Zef and Wild Boar weren’t sleeping, they were lying with their heads together, quietly but passionately arguing about something. Catching sight of Maxim, Zef hastily said “That’s enough!” and got to his feet. Jerking up his ginger beard and glaring wide-eyed, he yelled, “Where did you get to, massaraksh! Who gave you permission to leave? We have to work, or they won’t give us any chow, thirty-three massarakshes!”

At that point Maxim blew his top. “You go to hell, Zef! Can’t you think about anything else except gorging on chow? That’s all I’ve heard from you all day long: gorge, gorge, gorge! You can gorge on my canned stuff, if it tortures you so badly!”

He flung the cooking pot down on the ground, grabbed his backpack, and started threading his arms though the straps. Zef, who had crouched down in the face of this acoustic onslaught, gazed at Maxim with a stunned expression, his mouth gaping like a black hole in his fiery ginger beard. Then the mouth snapped shut with a gurgling, snorting sound, and Zef started roaring with laughter, setting the forest ringing. The one-handed man joined in, although his laughter could only be seen, not heard. Maxim couldn’t help himself, and he started laughing too, rather awkwardly. He felt embarrassed at his own rudeness.

“Massaraksh,” Zef eventually wheezed. “You got some voice!… Yes, my old buddy,” he said, turning to Wild Boar, “just you remember what I said. And by the way, I just said ‘That’s enough’… Get up!” he yelled. “And move it, if you want to… hmm… gorge yourselves this evening.”

And that was all. They yelled a bit, laughed a bit, turned serious, and set off again—to risk their lives in the names of the Unknown Fathers. Maxim furiously disarmed mines, smashed twin-barreled machine guns out of their nests, and unscrewed the warheads of surface-to-air missiles jutting out of their open hatches. Once again there was fire, stench, hissing jets of tear gas, and the repulsive odor of the decomposing corpses of animals shot by the automatons. They all got even dirtier, even angrier, even more ragged and tattered, and Zef wheezed to Maxim, “Move it, move it! If you want to gorge yourself, move it!”—and one-handed Wild Boar was finally exhausted and could barely drag himself along far behind them, leaning on his mine detector as if it were a staff…

In the course of those hours Maxim grew thoroughly sick and tired of Zef, and he was actually glad when his ginger-bearded companion suddenly bellowed and disappeared under the ground with a bump. Wiping the sweat off his dirty forehead with his dirty sleeve, Maxim unhurriedly walked over and stopped at the edge of a dark, narrow crevice hidden in the grass. The crevice was deep and pitch black, with a chilly, damp draft blowing up out of it; he couldn’t see anything, and all he could hear was a kind of crunching, fluttering sound, as well as unintelligible swearing. Wild Boar limped up, glanced into the crevice, and asked Maxim, “Is he in there? What’s he doing in there?”

“Zef!” Maxim called, leaning down. “Are you down there, Zef?”

A rumbling reply surfaced out of the crevice. “Come down here! Jump, it’s soft.”

Maxim looked at the one-handed man, who shook his head. “That’s not for me,” he said. “You jump, and I’ll lower a rope down to you afterward.”

“Who’s there!” Zef suddenly roared down below them. “I’ll fire, massaraksh!”

Maxim lowered his legs into the crevice, pushed off, and jumped. Almost immediately he sank up to his knees in some kind of crumbly mass and sat down. Zef was somewhere close by. Maxim closed his eyes and sat there for a few seconds, getting used to the darkness.

“Come this way, Mak, there’s someone here,” Zef boomed. “Boar!” he shouted. “Jump!” Wild Boar replied that he was dog tired and would be quite happy sitting up on top for a while.

“Suit yourself,” said Zef. “But I think this is the Fortress. You’ll regret it later.”

The one-handed man replied in a feeble, indistinct voice; apparently he was feeling nauseous again, and he had no interest in any Fortress. Maxim opened his eyes and looked around. He was sitting on a heap of earth in the middle of a long corridor with rough concrete walls. The gap in the ceiling was either a ventilation duct or a shell hole. Zef was standing about twenty steps away and also looking around, shining his flashlight.

“What is this place?” asked Maxim.

“How would I know? Maybe some kind of hideaway. Or maybe it really is the Fortress. Do you know what the Fortress is?”

“No,” said Maxim, and started clambering down off the heap of earth.

“You don’t know…” Zef absentmindedly said. He was still looking around, running the beam of his flashlight over the walls. “Then what do you know? Massaraksh,” he said. “Someone was here just now.”

“A human being?” asked Maxim.

“I don’t know,” Zef replied. “He crept along the wall and disappeared… And the Fortress, my friend, is the kind of thing that could allow us to finish all our work in a single day… Aha, tracks…”

He squatted down. Maxim squatted beside him and saw a line of imprints in the dust along the bottom of the wall. “Strange tracks,” he said.

“Yes, my friend,” said Zef, looking around. “I’ve never seen any tracks like these before.”

“As if someone walked by on his fists,” said Maxim. He clenched one fist and made an imprint beside the tracks.

“Looks like it,” Zef respectfully admitted. He shone the flashlight into the depths of the corridor. Something in there feebly glimmered, reflecting the light—either a bend or a dead end. “Should we go and take a look?” he asked.

“Quiet,” said Maxim. “Don’t talk and don’t move.”

The underground vault was damp and silent, but the corridor wasn’t completely empty of life. Someone was there, up ahead—although Maxim couldn’t make out exactly where or how far away—standing there, pressing himself against the wall, someone small, with a faint, unfamiliar smell, observing them and displeased by their presence. The creature was something entirely unfamiliar, and its intentions were unfathomable.

“Do we really have to go that way?” asked Maxim.

“I’d like to,” said Zef.

“What for?”

“We ought to take a look—maybe it is the Fortress after all… If we found the Fortress, my friend, then everything would suddenly be different. I don’t believe in the Fortress, but since they talk about it, who knows… Maybe not all of them are lying.”

“There’s someone there,” said Maxim. “I can’t figure out who.”

“Yes? Hmm… If this is the Fortress, the legend has it that either the remains of the garrison live here… you know, they’re still sitting in here, not knowing that the war is over—you know, at the very height of the war they declared themselves neutral, locked themselves in, and promised to blow up the entire continent if anyone came in after them…”

“And can they?”

“If this is the Fortress, they can do anything… Yeeeah, up on the surface there are explosions and shooting all the time. They could easily believe the war hasn’t ended yet… Some prince or duke was in command here—it would be good if we could meet with him and have a talk.”

Maxim intently listened. “No,” he confidently said. “That isn’t any prince or duke. It’s some kind of animal or something… No, not an animal… Or…”

“What do you mean, ‘or’?”

“You said, either the remains of the garrison, or…”

“Aah… That’s just nonsense, old wives’ tales… Let’s go and take a look.”

Zef loaded the grenade launcher, held it aimed roughly ahead, and moved forward, lighting his way with the flashlight. Maxim set off beside him. They trudged along the corridor for a few minutes, then came up against a wall and turned to the right.

“You’re making a lot of noise,” said Maxim. “Something’s going on up there, and you’re wheezing so loud…”

“What am I supposed to do, not breathe?” asked Zef, instantly getting his back up.

“And your flashlight is bothering me,” said Maxim.

“What do you mean, it’s bothering you? It’s dark.”

“I can see in the dark,” said Maxim, “but with that flashlight of yours I can’t make anything out… Let me go ahead, and you stay here. Or we’ll never find out anything.”

“Weeell, have it your way…” Zef said in an atypically hesitant tone of voice.

Maxim squeezed his eyes shut again, took a rest from the unreliable light, ducked down, and set off along the wall, trying not to make any noise at all. The unknown creature was somewhere close by, and Maxim was getting closer to it with every step. The corridor was endless. Doors appeared on the right, all made of iron and all locked. A faint draft was blowing toward him. The air was damp, filled with the odor of mold, together with that unfamiliar, living, warm scent. Zef moved after Mak with noisy caution; he was feeling uneasy and afraid of falling behind. Sensing that, Maxim laughed to himself, letting himself be distracted for literally only a second, and in that second the unknown being ahead of him disappeared.

Maxim halted, perplexed. The unknown creature had just been ahead of him, very close, and then it had seemed to dissolve into the air and appear behind his back, still very close, all in a single instant.

“Zef!” Maxim called.

“Yes!” his ginger-bearded companion responded in an echoing voice.

Maxim imagined the unknown creature standing between them, turning its head toward the voices by turns.

“He’s in between us,” said Maxim. “Don’t even think of shooting.”

“OK,” Zef said after a pause. “I can’t see a damn thing,” he declared. “What does he look like?”

“I don’t know,” replied Maxim. “Something soft.”

“An animal?”

“It doesn’t seem like it,” said Maxim.

“You said you could see in the dark.”

“I don’t see with my eyes,” said Maxim. “Be quiet.”

“Not with his eyes…” Zef growled, and fell silent.

The unknown creature stood there for a while, crossed the corridor, disappeared, and after a while appeared ahead of Maxim again. He’s curious too, thought Maxim. He tried hard to rouse a sense of fellow feeling in himself for this creature, but something prevented him—probably the unpleasant combination of a non-animal intellect with a semi-animal appearance. He moved forward again. The unknown creature retreated, maintaining a constant distance.

“How are things?” asked Zef.

“Still the same,” replied Maxim, “Maybe he’s leading us somewhere, or luring us.”

“Will we be able to deal with him?”

“He’s not planning to attack,” said Maxim. “He’s feeling curious too.”

He stopped talking, because the unknown creature had disappeared again, and Maxim immediately sensed that the corridor had come to an end. There was a large space around him. It was too dark here, though, and Maxim could see almost nothing, although he could sense the presence of metal and glass, there was a smell of rust, and there was high-voltage current somewhere in the space. Maxim stood there without moving for a few seconds and then, having determined where the switch was, reached his hand out to it, but then the unknown creature appeared again. And not alone. There was another one with him, similar but not exactly the same. They were standing by the same wall as Maxim, and he could hear their rapid, damp breathing. He froze, hoping that they would move closer, but they didn’t approach, and then, constricting his pupils as hard as he could, he pressed the switch.

Obviously there was something wrong with the circuit—the lamps flashed on for only a split second, a circuit breaker blew somewhere with a sharp crack, and the light went out again, but Maxim had time to see that the unknown creatures were small, each about the size of a large dog, and they stood on all fours, were covered with dark fur, and had large, heavy heads. Maxim didn’t get a chance to examine their eyes. The creatures immediately disappeared, as if they had never been there.

“How are things up there?” Zef asked in alarm. “What was that flash?”

“I turned the lights on,” Maxim replied. “Come here.”

“But where’s that creature? Did you see him?”

“Only for an instant. They look like animals after all. Like dogs with big heads…”

Shimmers of light from the flashlight started flickering across the walls. Zef spoke as he walked. “Ah, dogs… I know dogs like that live in the forest. I’ve never seen them alive, though, but I’ve seen plenty that had been shot…”

“No,” Maxim said with a doubtful air. “They aren’t animals, all the same.”

“Animals, they’re animals,” said Zef. His voice echoed hollowly under the high vault. “We needn’t have gotten freaked out. I almost started thinking they were ghouls… Massaraksh! But this is the Fortress!”

He stopped in the middle of the space, running the beam of the flashlight over the walls, over the rows of dials, over the switchboards. Glass, nickel, and discolored plastic glinted. “Well, congratulations, Mak. We found it after all. I was wrong not to believe in it… And what’s all this? Aha… It’s an electronic brain, and it’s all live, the power’s on. Ah, damn it, if we could just get Blacksmith in here… Listen. Do you understand anything at all about this?”

“About what exactly?” asked Maxim, moving closer.

“About all these mechanisms… This is the control room. If we can figure it out—the entire region is ours for the taking! All that technology on the surface is controlled from here! Ah, if we could just figure it out, massaraksh!”

Maxim took the flashlight from him and set it down so that the light dispersed through the space, and looked around. Dust was lying everywhere, and it had been lying there for years: on the desk in the corner, on the spread-out sheets of decayed paper. There was a plate, stained with something black, with a fork beside it. Maxim walked along the consoles, touched the sliding gauges, and tried to switch on an electronic device—and was left holding the handle in his fingers.

“Hardly,” he eventually said. “It’s not very likely that anything special could be controlled from here. In the first place, everything here is too simple. Most likely this is either an observation station or one of the control substations—everything here has some kind of auxiliary function—and it’s a weak machine, not big enough to control even ten tanks… And then, everything here has decayed, just touch anything and it falls apart. There’s electric current, but the voltage is lower than it should be; the atomic boiler’s probably completely decrepit. No, Zef, all this isn’t as simple as it seems to you.”

Suddenly he noticed two long, slim pipes protruding from the wall, connected by a rubber eye mask. Pulling up an aluminum chair, he sat down and stuck his face into the mask. To his surprise, the optics turned out to be in excellent condition, but he was even more surprised by what he saw. His field of view was filled by an entirely unfamiliar landscape: a whitish-yellow desert, sand dunes, the skeleton of some kind of metal structure… A strong wind was blowing there, rivulets of sand were running across the dunes, and the murky horizon was curved up like a bowl.

“Take a look,” he told Zef. “Where is that?”

Zef leaned his grenade launcher against a control console, walked over, and looked. “Strange,” he said after a moment’s pause. “That’s the desert. And that, my friend, is about two hundred fifty miles away from us…” He moved back from the eyepiece and looked up at Maxim. “All the work they put into all this, the bastards… And what’s the point of it? The wind sweeps across the sands down there now, but what a land that used to be! They used to take me to a resort there as a kid before the war…”

He got up. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said in a bitter voice, and picked up the flashlight. “The two of us won’t figure out anything here. We’ll have to wait until they grab Blacksmith and put him away… Only they won’t put him away, they’ll probably shoot him… Well, shall we go?”

“Yes,” said Maxim. He was examining some strange tracks on the floor. “This here interests me a lot more,” he declared.

“Don’t waste your time,” said Zef. “All sorts of animals must run around in here.” He slung his grenade launcher behind his shoulder and set off toward the exit from the hall. Maxim followed him, looking back at the tracks.

“I want some grub,” said Zef.

As they walked along the corridor. Maxim suggested breaking in one of the doors, but Zef’s opinion was that it would be pointless. “This business has to be handled seriously,” he said. “What’s the point of us wasting time here? We still haven’t fulfilled the norm, and we need to come here with someone who’s well informed…”

“If I were you,” Maxim remarked, “I wouldn’t hope for too much from this Fortress of yours. In the first place, everything here has rotted, and in the second place, it’s already occupied.”

“Who by? Ah, you mean the dogs again? You’re just like the others, they harp on about ghouls, and you—”

Zef stopped. A guttural whooping sound hurtled along the corridor, reverberating off the walls in multiple echoes, and fell silent. And immediately, from somewhere far away, a voice exactly like it responded. These sounds were very familiar, but Maxim simply couldn’t recall where he’d heard them.

“So that’s who calls at night!” said Zef. “And we thought they were birds.”

“A strange call,” said Maxim.

“I don’t know about strange,” Zef objected. “But it’s pretty scary all right. When they start yelling all the way across the forest at night, it sends your heart right down into your boots. They tell lots of stories about those calls. There was one jailbird, he used to boast about knowing that language of theirs. He used to translate it.”

“And what did he translate?” asked Maxim.

“Ah, garbage. That’s no kind of language…”

“And where is this jailbird?”

“He got eaten,” said Zef. “He was one of the builders, his gang lost its way in the forest, the guys got hungry, and you know the way it goes…”

They turned left, and up ahead in the distance they saw a pale, hazy light-colored patch. Zef switched off the flashlight and put it away in his pocket. He was walking in front now, and when he abruptly halted, Maxim almost ran into him.

“Massaraksh,” Zef muttered.

Lying across the floor of the corridor was a human skeleton.

Zef took the grenade launcher off his shoulder and looked around. “That wasn’t here before,” he muttered.

“No,” said Maxim. “It’s just been put there.”

In the underground depths behind them an entire chorus of lingering, guttural howls suddenly burst out. The howls mingled with their own echo, making it seem like a thousand throats were all howling in chorus, as if they were chanting a strange word with four syllables. Maxim could sense scorn, defiance, and mockery. Then the chorus fell silent as abruptly as it had begun.

Zef noisily drew in his breath and lowered the grenade launcher. Maxim looked at the skeleton again. “I think this is a hint,” he said.

“I think so too,” Zef muttered. “Let’s go quick.”

They quickly reached the break in the ceiling, clambered onto the heap of earth, and saw Boar’s alarmed face above them. He was lying with his chest on the edge of the break, dangling a rope with a loop on it.

“What happened down there?” he asked. “Was that you screaming?”

“We’ll tell you in a minute,” said Zef. “Have you anchored the rope?”

They clambered up. Zef rolled cigarettes for himself and the one-handed man, lit up, and said nothing for a while, apparently trying to piece together some kind of opinion about what had happened.

“OK,” he said at last. “In brief, this is what happened. This is the Fortress. There are control panels in there, a brain and all the rest of it. It’s all in a sorry state, but there is power, and we’ll make good use of it, we just have to find people who know about these things… And then…” He dragged on his cigarette, opened his mouth wide, and released a cloud of smoke, exactly like a broken gas projector. “And then… It looks like dogs live there. Remember I told you about them? Those dogs with heads like a bear’s. It was them screaming… but, if you think about it, maybe it wasn’t them, because, you see… how can I put it?… while Mak and I were wandering about down there, somebody laid out a human skeleton in the corridor. And that’s all.”

The one-handed man looked at him, and then at Maxim. “Mutants?” he asked.

“Possibly,” said Zef. “I didn’t see anyone at all, but Mak says he saw dogs… only not with his eyes. How did you see them down there, Mak?”

“I saw them with my eyes as well,” said Maxim. “And, by the way, I’d like to add that there was nobody else there apart from what you’re calling dogs. I would have known. And these dogs of yours aren’t what you think. They’re not animals.”

Wild Boar didn’t say anything. He got to his feet, coiled up the rope, hung it on his belt, and sat down beside Zef again.

“Damned if I know,” Zef muttered. “Maybe they aren’t animals… Anything’s possible here. In this South of ours…”

“Or maybe those dogs are mutants after all?” Maxim asked.

“No,” said Zef. “Mutants are simply very ugly people. And the children of perfectly ordinary people. Mutants. Do you know what that means?”

“I do,” said Maxim. “But the entire question is how far a mutation can go.”

They all said nothing for a while, pondering. Then Zef said, “Well, if you’re so well educated, there’s no point in idle chatter. Let’s move on!” He got to his feet. “We don’t have much left to do, but time’s pressing. And I want to gorge myself…”—he winked at Maxim—“…the desire’s downright pathological. Do you know what ‘pathological’ means?”

Maxim said he did, and they set off.

There was still the southwestern quarter of the quadrant to clear, but they didn’t try to clear anything. At some point in the past, something very powerful must have exploded here. All that remained of the old forest were half-rotten felled trunks and scorched stumps, looking as if they had been sheared off by a razor, and sparse young growth was already springing up on the site of the old forest. The soil was charred black and spiked with powdered rust. No kind of technology could have survived an attack like that, and Maxim realized that Zef had not brought them here to work.

A shaggy-looking man in a dirty convict’s coverall clambered out of the undergrowth, coming toward them. Maxim recognized him: he was the first indigenous inhabitant that he had encountered, Zef’s old partner, the vessel of universal despondency.

“Wait,” said Wild Boar, “I’ll have a word with him.

Zef told Maxim to sit down where he was standing, then sat down himself and started rewinding his foot-cloths, whistling into his beard a sentimental criminal’s song: “I’m a wild boy, known throughout the neighborhood.” Wild Boar walked over to the vessel of despondency and they moved away behind the bushes and started talking in a whisper. Maxim could hear them perfectly well, but he couldn’t understand anything, because they were speaking some kind of argot, and the only word he could recognize was “mail,” repeated several times.

Soon he stopped listening. He was feeling exhausted and dirty. Today there had been too much senseless work and senseless nervous stress, today he had breathed all sorts of garbage and been exposed to too many roentgens. And yet again in the course of the entire day nothing really genuine had been done, nothing truly necessary, and he really didn’t want to go back to the bunkhouse.

Then the vessel of despondency disappeared and Wild Boar came back, sat down in front of Maxim, and said, “OK, let’s talk.”

“Is everything in order?” Zef asked.

“Yes,” said Wild Boar.

“I told you,” said Zef, examining his foot cloth against the light. “I’ve got a nose for his kind.”

“Well now, Mak,” said Wild Boar. “We’ve checked you out, as far as that’s possible in our situation. General vouches for you. Starting from today, you’ll be under my command.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” Maxim said with a crooked smile. He felt like saying, Only General hasn’t vouched for you to me, has he? but he only added, “I’m listening.”

“General tells us that that you’re not afraid of radiation and you’re not afraid of the radiation towers. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“So you can swim across the Blue Serpent any time you like and it won’t do you any harm?”

“I already told you I could escape from here right now.”

“We don’t want you to escape… And as far as I understand, you’re not afraid of the patrol machines either?”

“You mean the mobile radiation devices? No, I’m not afraid of them.”

“Very good,” said Wild Boar. “Then your task for the immediate future is completely defined. You’ll be a messenger. When I order you to, you’ll swim across the river and send the telegrams I give you from the nearest post office. Is that clear?”

“That’s clear,” Maxim said slowly. “But there’s something else that isn’t clear…”

Wild Boar looked at him without blinking—a lean, sinewy, disfigured old man, a cool and merciless fighter, a warrior for forty years, maybe even a warrior since he was in diapers, a terrifying and exultant product of a world in which the value of human life is equal to zero, knowing nothing except fighting, rejecting everything except the fight—and in his keenly narrowed eyes Maxim read his own fate for the next few years as clearly as in a book.

“Yes?” asked Wild Boar.

“Let’s agree straightaway,” Maxim firmly said. “I don’t want to act blindly. I don’t intend to do work that, in my view, is absurd and unnecessary.”

“For instance?” asked Wild Boar.

“I know what discipline is. And I know that without discipline all our work is completely worthless. But I believe that discipline must be rational, and a subordinate must be certain that an order is rational. You are ordering me to be a messenger. I’m willing to be a messenger. I’m good for more than that, but if it’s necessary, I’ll be a messenger. Only I have to know that the telegrams I send will not facilitate the senseless death of people who are wretched enough already—”

Zef jerked up his massive beard, but Wild Boar and Maxim stopped him with identical gestures.

“I was ordered to blow up a tower,” Maxim continued. “Nobody explained to me why it was necessary. I could see it was a stupid, disastrous idea, but I carried out the order. I lost three comrades, and then it turned out that the whole thing was a trap, set by the state prosecutor’s office. And I say: no more! I don’t intend to attack the towers anymore. And what’s more, I intend to impede operations of that kind in every way I can.”

“Why, you fool!” said Zef. “You snot-nosed kid.”

“Why?” asked Maxim.

“Wait, Zef,” said Wild Boar, still keeping his eyes fixed on Maxim. “In other words, Mak, you want to know all of HQ’s plans?”

“Yes,” said Maxim. “I don’t want to work blindly.”

“Well, brother, you’ve got some nerve,” Zef declared. “I don’t even know the words to describe the kind of brass balls you’ve got! Listen, Boar, I like him. Yeeeah, I’ve got a keen eye all right…”

“You’re demanding too much trust,” Wild Boar said in a cold voice. “Trust like that has to be earned in rank-and-file work.”

“And does rank-and-file work consist of knocking down those idiotic towers?” asked Maxim. “Of course, I’ve only been in the underground for a few months, but in all that time the only thing I’ve heard is towers, towers, towers… But I don’t want to knock down towers—it’s senseless! I want to fight against tyranny, against hunger, ruin, corruption, and lies… against the system of falsehood and not against the system of towers. Of course, I understand that the towers cause you torment, sheer physical torment… But even the action you take against the towers is pretty foolish. It’s absolutely obvious that the towers are only relay stations, so you have to strike at the Center, and not pick them off one by one.”

Wild Boar and Zef started speaking simultaneously. “How do you know about the Center?” asked Wild Boar.

“And where are you going to find this Center of yours?” asked Zef.

“The fact that a Center must exist is obvious to any even slightly competent engineer,” Maxim said with a condescending air. “And how we can find the Center is the task we should be working on. Not running at machine guns, not pointlessly wasting peoples’ lives, but searching for the Center.”

“In the first place, we know all that without you,” said Zef, seething. “And in the second place, massaraksh, nobody has died for nothing. It should be obvious to any even slightly competent engineer, you snot-nosed twerp, that by bringing down a number of towers, we disrupt the relay system, and we can liberate an entire region! For that, we have to be able to knock down towers. And we’re learning to do that, do you understand that or not? And if you ever again, massaraksh, say that our guys are dying in vain—”

“Wait,” said Maxim. “Put your hands down. Liberate a region? So OK, and then what?”

“Every snot-nose comes here and tells us we’re dying in vain,” said Zef.

“And then what?” Maxim insistently repeated. “The Guards ship in mobile radiation devices and you’re done for?”

“Damn it all!” said Zef. “In that time the population of the region will come over to our side, and it won’t be that easy for them to stick their noses in. A dozen so-called degenerates is one thing, but ten thousand enraged peasants is another—”

“Zef, Zef!” Wild Boar admonished him.

Zef gestured at him impatiently. “Ten thousand enraged peasants who have realized, and now will never forget, that they were shamelessly duped for twenty years.”

Wild Boar despairingly gestured and turned away.

“Wait, wait,” said Maxim. “What are you saying? Why the hell should they suddenly realize that? Why, they’ll tear you to pieces. They think the towers are for antiballistic defense…”

“And what do you think?” Zef asked, chuckling strangely.

“Well, I know,” said Maxim. “They told me.”

“Who did?”

“Doc… and General… Why, is it a secret?”

“Maybe that’s enough on this subject?” Wild Boar said in a quiet voice.

“Why is that enough?” Zef objected in an equally quiet voice, and in a very cultured manner. “Why exactly is that enough, Boar? You know what I think about this. You know why I stay here and why I’ll be here until my dying day. And I know what you think about this subject. So then why is that enough? We both believe that this should be shouted from all the rooftops. But when it comes to doing anything about it, we suddenly remember our underground discipline and go on meekly playing into the hands of all those leaderist types, liberals and enlighteners, all those failed Fathers… And now we have this boy right here in front of us. You can see what he’s like. Why on earth aren’t guys like him allowed to know?”

“Maybe it’s precisely guys like him who shouldn’t be allowed to know,” Wild Boar replied, still in the same quiet voice.

Maxim shifted his gaze back and forth, from one of them to the other. He was puzzled; they had suddenly become almost unrecognizable. They had somehow wilted, and Maxim could no longer sense in Wild Boar the steely core on which so many prosecutor’s offices and field courts had broken their teeth, and Zef’s harum-scarum vulgarity had evaporated. A strange melancholy had broken through, a strange, previously concealed feeling of despair, resentment, and resignation—as if they had both remembered something they ought to have forgotten and had honestly tried to forget.

“I’m going to tell him,” said Zef. He wasn’t asking for permission or advice, he was simply stating his intention. Wild Boar said nothing, and Zef started telling Maxim the facts.

What he told Maxim was horrendous. It was horrendous in its own right, and it was horrendous because it left no more room for any doubts. All the time Zef was speaking—quietly, calmly, in correct, cultured language, and politely remaining silent when Wild Boar interpolated brief phrases—Maxim kept trying to identify some rent in the fabric of this new system of the world, but all his efforts were in vain. The picture that emerged was tidy, primitive, and hopelessly logical; it explained each of the facts known to Maxim, without leaving a single one unexplained. It was the greatest and the most terrible discovery of all the discoveries that Maxim had made on his inhabited island.

The radiation from the towers was not directed at the degenerates. It affected the nervous system of every human being on this planet. The physiological mechanism of this influence was not known, but the essential effect was that the brain of any individual exposed to the radiation lost its ability to critically analyze reality. A thinking individual was transformed into a believing individual—moreover, into an individual who believed frenziedly and fanatically, in defiance of the obvious reality in front of his very eyes. When an individual was in the field of radiation, the most elementary means could be used to instill absolutely any belief at all into him; he accepted whatever was instilled as the single, bright, and unique truth, and was willing to live for it, suffer for it, and die for it.

And the field was always there. Unnoticed, omnipresent, all-permeating. It constantly emanated from the gigantic network of towers that enmeshed the country. Like a gigantic vacuum cleaner, it sucked out of tens of millions of souls the very slightest doubt about what was proclaimed by the newspapers, pamphlets, radio, and television, about what was repeated over and over by teachers in schools and officers in barracks, about what glittered in neon signs across the streets and was pronounced from the pulpits of the churches. The Unknown Fathers directed the will and energy of the masses of millions in whatever direction they saw fit. They could and did compel the masses to adore them; they could and did incite unquenchable hatred for external and internal enemies; if they wished, they could direct millions to face artillery guns and machine guns, and the millions would go to die, exulting; they could make millions kill each other in the name of absolutely anything at all; if they conceived such a caprice, they could incite a mass epidemic of suicides… They could do anything.

And twice a day, at ten in the morning and ten in the evening, the gigantic vacuum cleaner was turned up to full power, and for half an hour people simply ceased to be people. All the hidden tensions that had accumulated in their subconscious as a result of the disparity between what had been instilled in them and what was real were released in an ecstatic paroxysm of obsequious servility and adulation. These radiation attacks totally suppressed all natural introspection and instinctive responses, replacing them with a monstrous complex of veneration and duty to the Unknown Fathers. In this condition a person exposed to the radiation completely lost the ability to think rationally and simply acted like a robot that had received a command.

Any danger for the Fathers could only come from those individuals who, owing to certain physiological peculiarities, were not susceptible to suggestion. They were called degenerates. The constant field of radiation had no effect on them at all, and the intense radiation attacks simply inflicted intolerable pain on them. There were relatively few degenerates, about 1 percent or so of the population, but they were the only people who were awake in this kingdom of sleepwalkers. Only they retained the ability to assess a situation soberly and to perceive the world as it was, to act on the world, to change it and control it.

And the most heinous thing of all was that they provided society with the ruling elite that were called the Unknown Fathers. All the Unknown Fathers were degenerates, but by no means were all degenerates Unknown Fathers. And those who had failed to join this elite, or did not wish to join this elite, or did not know that this elite existed—an elite of power-hungry degenerates, revolutionary degenerates, and philistine degenerates—were declared enemies of mankind and dealt with accordingly.

Maxim was overwhelmed by a despair as great as if he had suddenly discovered that his inhabited island was actually populated not by human beings but by puppets. There was nothing left for him to hope for. Zef’s plan to seize control of a sizable region now seemed like plain adventurism to Maxim. He was faced with an immense machine, too simple to evolve and too immense for him to hope that he could destroy it with small forces. There was no force in the country capable of liberating an immense nation that had no idea it wasn’t free, a nation that had fallen out of history, to use an expression of Wild Boar’s. This machine was invulnerable from the inside. It was proof against any minor disturbances. If it was partially destroyed, it immediately restored itself. When it was irritated, it immediately and unambiguously reacted to the irritant, entirely disregarding the fate of its own individual elements.

The only remaining hope lay in the thought that the machine had a Center, a control panel, a brain. This Center could theoretically be destroyed, and then the machine would halt in a state of unstable equilibrium, and a moment would come when it would be possible to try switching this world onto a different set of tracks, setting it back on the rails of history. But the location of the Center was an absolute secret, and who would destroy it?

This was no simple attack on a tower. It was an operation that would require immense resources and, first and foremost, an army of people who were not affected by the radiation. It would require either people who were not susceptible to the radiation or some simple, readily obtainable means of protection from it. Neither of these things existed, and they could not even be expected to appear in the future. The hundreds of thousands of degenerates were fragmented, disunited, and persecuted. Many of them actually belonged to the category of so-called legals, but even if they could be united and armed, the Unknown Fathers would immediately annihilate this little army by sending mobile radiation units, set to maximum power, to confront them.

Zef had stopped talking long ago, but Maxim kept sitting there, dejectedly scrabbling at the black, dry earth with a twig. Then Zef coughed and awkwardly said, “Yes, my friend. That’s the way things really are.” He seemed to already regret having told Maxim the way things really were.

“What are you hoping for?” Maxim asked.

Neither Zef nor Wild Boar said anything.

Maxim raised his head, saw their faces and murmured, “I’m sorry… I… It’s all so… I’m sorry.”

“We have to fight,” Wild Boar declared in a flat voice. “We are fighting, and we’ll keep on fighting. Zef has told you one of HQ’s strategies. There are others, equally vulnerable to criticism, that have never been tried in practice. You have to understand that everything we have right now is still in its formative stage. You can’t develop a mature theory of struggle starting from scratch in just twenty-odd years.”

“Tell me,” Maxim said slowly, “this radiation… Does it affect all the races of your world in the same way?”

Wild Boar and Zef exchanged glances. “I don’t understand,” said Wild Boar.

“What I’m thinking of is this: Is there any nation here in which you could find at least several thousand individuals like me?”

“It’s not likely,” said Zef. “Except among those… those mutants. Massaraksh, don’t be offended, Mak, but after all, you’re obviously a mutant… An advantageous mutation, one chance in a million…”

“I’m not offended,” said Maxim. “So, the mutants. That means down there, farther south?”

“Yes,” said Wild Boar. He was gazing at Maxim intently.

“And what’s actually down there, to the south?” Maxim asked.

“Forest, then desert,” Wild Boar replied.

“And mutants?”

“Yes. Half animals. Insane savages… Listen, Mak, drop this idea.”

“Have you ever seen them?”

“I’ve only seen dead ones,” said Wild Boar. “They sometimes catch them in the forest, and then they hang them in front of the bunkhouses to improve morale.”

“But what for?”

“What for?” Zef roared. “You fool! They’re wild beasts! They’re incurable, and more dangerous than any animals! I’ve seen some of them—you’ve never seen anything like it, even in your dreams.”

“Then why are they running towers down there?” asked Maxim. “Do they want to tame them?”

“Drop it, Mak,” Wild Boar said again. “It’s hopeless. They hate us… But then, do what you think is best. We don’t hold anybody here.”

There was silence for a while. And then behind them, in the distance, they heard a familiar growling sound.

Zef half rose. “A tank,” he mused. “Should we go and kill it? It’s not far away, quadrant eighteen… No, tomorrow.”

Maxim made a sudden decision. “I’ll deal with it. You go, I’ll catch up with you.”

Zef gave him a doubtful look. “Will you manage OK?” he asked. “You could blow yourself up.”

“Mak,” said the one-handed man. “Think!”

Zef was still looking at Maxim, then suddenly he bared his teeth in a grin. “Ah, that’s what you want the tank for!” he said. “You sly young dog. Naaah, you can’t fool me. OK. Go. I’ll keep your supper for you; if you change your mind, come back and gorge on it… Oh, and bear in mind that lots of the self-propelled vehicles are booby-trapped, so be careful how you rummage around in there… Let’s go, Boar. He’ll catch up with us.”

Wild Boar was about to say something, but Maxim had already gotten up and started striding toward the road through the forest. He didn’t want any more talk. He walked quickly, without looking back, holding his grenade launcher under his arm. Now that he had made his decision, he felt relieved, and what had to be done now depended only on his own know-how and his own dexterity.

14

Early in the morning Maxim drove the tank out onto the highway and pointed its nose toward the south. He could go now, but he clambered out of the control bay, jumped down onto the smashed concrete, and sat on the edge of the roadside ditch, wiping his dirty hands with grass. The rusty hulk calmly gurgled beside him, with the pointed top of its rocket aimed up at the sky.

He had worked all night but didn’t feel tired at all. The indigenous population here built things soundly, and the machine was in pretty good condition. No booby traps had been discovered, of course, but on the other hand, there was a manual control system. If anybody really had blown himself up in a machine like this, it could only have happened because the boiler was absolutely worn out or because he was a total technical ignoramus. True, the boiler was generating no more than 20 percent of normal power, and the undercarriage was thoroughly battered, but Maxim was content—yesterday he hadn’t hoped for even this much.

It was about six o’clock in the morning and already quite bright. Usually at this time the educatees were drawn up into check-cloth columns, hastily fed, and driven out to work. Maxim’s absence had already been noticed, of course, and it was quite possible that now he was listed as a fugitive and had been condemned to death. Or maybe Zef had thought up some kind of explanation—that he’d sprained his foot, been wounded, or something of that sort.

The forest had turned quiet. The “dogs,” who had called to each other all night, had calmed down, and probably retreated underground, where they were giggling and rubbing their paws together as they recalled how they had frightened those bipeds yesterday… He ought to give some serious attention to these “dogs” later on, but right now he would have to leave them behind. He wondered if they were sensitive to the radiation or not.

Such strange creatures… At night, while he was rummaging in the motor, two of them had loitered nearby behind the bushes all the time, slyly observing him, and then a third had come and climbed up a tree in order to get a better view. Maxim had stuck his head out of the hatch and waved to him and then, simply for the sake of mischief, reproduced as well as he could the four-syllable word that the choir had chanted the day before. The one up on the tree became absolutely furious: his eyes vehemently glinted, the fur all over his body stood up on end, and he started shouting some kind of guttural insults. The two in the bushes were obviously shocked by this, because they immediately left and didn’t come back. But the abusive one stayed up in the tree for a long time, quite unable to calm down—he hissed and spat, and pretended that he was going to attack, baring his widely spaced white fangs. He only cleared off when it was almost morning, having realized that Maxim had no intention of taking him on in a fair fight…

It was unlikely that these creatures were rational in the human sense, but they were fascinating, and they probably represented some kind of organized force, if they had dislodged the military garrison commanded by the prince or duke from the Fortress… There was so little information available here, nothing but rumors and legends…

It would have been good to wash up now. He was smeared all over with rust, and the boiler was leaking too; his skin was stinging from the radiation. If Zef and his one-handed comrade agreed to go along, he would have to block off the boiler with three or four slabs of metal, tear some of the armor off the flanks…

Far away in the forest there was a loud thud, followed by a resounding echo—the suicide-squad sappers had started their working day. Senseless, so senseless… There was another loud thud, and a machine gun started chattering, carrying on for a long time, before eventually falling silent. The day turned completely light, and it was bright, with a cloudless sky, as even and white as glowing milk. The concrete on the highway glittered with dew, but there was no dew around the tank—the armor radiated a noxious warmth.

Zef and Wild Boar appeared out of the bushes that had crept out onto the road, saw the tank, and started walking faster. Maxim got up and went toward them.

“You’re alive!” Zef said instead of greeting him. “Just as I expected. Your gruel… I… you know, brother, there was nothing to carry it in. But I brought your bread, here, scoff it down.”

“Thanks,” said Maxim, taking the crusty end of a loaf.

Wild Boar stood there, leaning on his mine detector and looking at Maxim.

“Eat up and get out of here,” said Zef. “They’ve come to collect you, brother. I reckon they want you for further investigation.”

“Who?” Maxim asked, and stopped chewing.

“He didn’t report to us,” said Zef. “Some flunky or other covered in medals from head to toe. He bawled out the entire camp, demanding to know why you weren’t there, and almost shot me… but I, you know, just gaped at him and reported that you’d died the death of the brave in a minefield.” He walked around the tank, said “Filthy heap of garbage,” sat down on the shoulder of the road, and started rolling a cigarette.

“Strange,” said Maxim, pensively taking a bite of the bread. “For further investigation? What for?”

“Maybe it’s Fank?” Wild Boar asked in a low voice.

“Fank? Average height, square face, peeling skin?”

“Nothing of the kind,” said Zef. “A lanky great beanpole, covered in pimples, as dim-witted as they come. A guardsman.”

“That’s not Fank,” said Maxim.

“Maybe it’s on Fank’s orders?” Wild Boar suggested.

Maxim shrugged and dispatched the final piece of crust into his mouth. “I don’t know,” he said. “I used to think that Fank had something to do with the underground, but now I just don’t know what to think…”

“Then you’d definitely better leave,” said Wild Boar. “Although, to be quite honest, I don’t know what’s worse—that Guards officer or the mutants…”

“Come on, now, let him go,” said Zef. “He’s not going to work as a courier for you in any case, and this way at least he might bring back some kind of information about the South… if they don’t skin him alive down there.”

“You won’t go with me, of course,” Maxim said in an affirmative tone of voice.

Wild Boar shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wish you luck.”

“Dump the rocket,” Zef advised him. “Or you’ll get blown up along with it… And remember this: There’ll be two checkpoints ahead. You’ll easily skip through them, only don’t stop. They face south. And after that the farther you go, the worse it gets. Appalling radiation, nothing to eat, mutants, and even farther on—nothing but sand and drought.”

“Thanks,” said Maxim. “Good-bye.” He jumped up onto a caterpillar track, swung open the hatch, and clambered into the hot semi-darkness. He had already set his hands on the levers when he remembered that he had one more question to ask.

He stuck his head out. “Listen,” he said, “why is the true purpose of the towers hidden from the rank-and-file members of the underground?”

Zef grimaced and spat, and Wild Boar sadly replied, “Because most of the guys at HQ are hoping someday to seize power and use the towers in the same old way, but for different goals.”

“What different goals?” Maxim morosely asked.

For a few seconds they gazed into each other’s eyes. Zef turned away and started intently gluing together his roll-up with his tongue. Then Maxim said, “I hope you both survive,” and turned back to the levers. The tank started rumbling and clanging, its caterpillar tracks crunched, and it trundled forward.

Driving the machine was awkward. There was no seat for the driver, and the heap of branches and grass that Maxim had flung together during the night rapidly crept apart. The visibility was appallingly bad, and he wasn’t able to build up any serious speed—at twenty miles an hour something in the motor started clattering and spluttering, giving out a vile smell. But this atomic bier still coped excellently with any kind of terrain. Road or no road—that didn’t matter, it simply didn’t notice the bushes in the shallow ruts, and it crushed fallen trees to splinters. It easily rode right over the young trees that had sprouted through the cracked concrete, and even seemed to snort in enjoyment as it crept through the deep pits filled with stagnant water. And it maintained direction excellently—turning it was extremely hard.

The highway was fairly straight, and the control bay was dirty and stifling, so eventually Maxim set the manual controls, climbed out, and comfortably settled himself on the edge of the hatch under the latticework of the rocket launching tube. The tank kept on barging forward, as if this was its genuine course, set by its old program. There was something simple-spirited and self-satisfied about it, and Maxim, who loved machines, even slapped his hand on its armor plating to express his approval.

Life was OK. The forest crept past, back, and away on the left and the right, the engine smoothly gurgled, up here on top he could hardly even feel the radiation, the breeze was relatively clean, and it soothed his stinging skin with its pleasant coolness. Maxim raised his head and glanced at the swaying nose of the rocket. He probably really ought to dump it. Unnecessary weight. It wouldn’t actually explode, of course. It had been defunct for a long time—he had inspected it during the night. But it weighed a good ten tons, so why lug something like that around? The tank kept creeping forward, and Maxim started climbing over the launch tube, looking for the attachment mechanism. He found the mechanism, but everything had rusted, so Maxim had to fiddle with it, and twice while he was fiddling the tank ran off the road into the forest at a bend and started smashing down trees, wrathfully howling, so that Maxim had to hurry back to the levers, calm the iron fool down, and lead it back out onto the highway. But eventually the mechanism worked: the rocket cumbersomely keeled over, crashed down onto the concrete, and then laboriously rolled off into the ditch. The tank gave a little skip and started moving more lightly, and then Maxim saw the first checkpoint ahead.

Two large tents and a small enclosed truck were standing at the edge of the forest, and smoke was rising from a kitchen truck. Two guardsmen, naked to the waist, were getting washed—one was rinsing off the other with a mess tin. A sentry in a black cape was standing in the middle of the highway looking at the tank, and to the right of the highway two posts jutted up, connected by a crossbeam, with something long and white dangling from it, almost touching the ground. Maxim sank down into the hatch so that his check coverall wouldn’t be seen, and then put his head out. Gazing at the tank in amazement, the sentry moved over to the shoulder of the road, and then looked around in confusion at the truck. The seminaked guardsmen stopped washing themselves and also looked at the tank.

The rumbling of the caterpillar tracks drew several more men out of the tents and the truck, one of them in a uniform with an officer’s braids. They were very surprised but not alarmed—the officer pointed at the tank and said something, and they all laughed. When Maxim drew level with the sentry, the sentry shouted something that was inaudible above the noise of the motor, and Maxim shouted in reply, “Everything’s in order, just stay where you are.” The sentry couldn’t hear anything either, but a reassured expression appeared on his face. After letting the tank pass by, he walked back out into the middle of the highway and resumed his former pose. Everything had obviously gone just fine.

Maxim turned his head and got a close-up view of what was hanging from the crossbeam. He looked for a second, then quickly squatted down, squeezed his eyes shut, and grabbed hold of the levers, although there was no need for that. I shouldn’t have looked, he thought. It was damned stupid to turn my head—I should just have kept going and I would never have known… He forced himself to open his eyes. No, he thought. I have to look. I have to get used to it. And I have to find out. It’s pointless to turn away. I have no right to turn away once I’ve taken on this job. It was probably a mutant—death couldn’t mutilate a human being like that. But what mutilates people is life. It will mutilate me too, there’s no way to escape that. And I shouldn’t try to resist; I have to get used to it. Maybe there are hundreds of miles of roads lined with gallows trees ahead of me…

When he stuck his head out of the hatch again and looked back, he could no longer see the checkpoint—there was no more checkpoint, and no solitary gallows beside the road. How good it would be now to go home… just set off and keep going, and there at the end of it would be his home, his mother, his father, the guys… arrive, wake up, wash up, and tell them his terrible dream about an inhabited island…

He tried to picture Earth, but he couldn’t manage it. It just felt strange to think that somewhere there were clean, cheerful cities with lots of kind, intelligent people, where everybody trusted each other and there was no iron, no bad smells, no radiation, no black uniforms, no coarse, brutish faces, no terrible legends mingled with an even more terrible truth. And suddenly for the first time he thought that the same thing could have happened on Earth, and at this stage it would be just like everything around him now—ignorant, deceived, servile, and devoted. You were looking for work, he thought. Well, now look, you have a job to do—a difficult job, a dirty job, but you’re not likely ever to find another one anywhere as important as this…

Up ahead on the highway some kind of mechanism appeared, slowly creeping along in the same direction as him—southward. It was a small tractor with caterpillar tracks, dragging along a trailer with a latticework metal beam. A man in a check coverall was sitting in the open cabin smoking a pipe; he indifferently looked at the tank, looked at Maxim, and turned away. What kind of beam is that? Maxim thought. Those contours look familiar… Then suddenly he realized that it was a section of a tower. I could just shove it into the ditch, he thought, and drive backward and forward over it a couple of times… Maxim looked around, and the tractor driver apparently didn’t like the expression on his face at all; he suddenly braked and lowered one leg onto a caterpillar track, as if he was getting ready to jump. Maxim turned away.

About ten minutes later he saw the second checkpoint. It was an advance outpost with an immense army of slaves in check coveralls—or maybe they weren’t slaves at all but the freest men in the country—two small temporary buildings with glittering zinc roofs, and a low artificial hill with a squat blockhouse, complete with the black slits of gun embrasures, standing on it. The first sections of a tower were already rising up above the blockhouse; motorized cranes and tractors stood around the hill, and iron beams lay scattered about. The forest had been obliterated for several hundred yards on the right and left of the highway, and men in check coveralls were puttering around here and there in the open space. Behind the two small buildings Maxim could see a long, low bunkhouse, the same as the one in the camp. In front of the bunkhouse gray rags were drying on lines. A little farther on there was a wooden pylon with a platform beside the highway; a sentry in an army uniform and deep helmet was striding around on the platform, which had a machine gun on a tripod set up on it. More soldiers were jostling about under the tower; they had the air of men exhausted by mosquitoes and boredom. All of them were smoking.

Well, I’ll pass through here without any trouble too, thought Maxim. This is the edge of the world, and nobody gives a damn about anything. But he was mistaken. The soldiers stopped waving away the mosquitoes and stared at the tank. Then one of them, a skinny guy who looked very much like someone or other he knew, adjusted the helmet on his head, walked out into the middle of the highway, and raised his hand. You shouldn’t have done that, Maxim regretfully thought. That won’t be good for you. I’ve decided to drive through here, and I’m going to drive through… He slid down to the levers, settled himself comfortably, and put his foot on the accelerator. The soldier on the highway kept standing there with his hand raised. Now I’ll step on the gas, Maxim thought, roar like blazes, and he’ll jump out of the way… And if he doesn’t jump, Maxim thought with abrupt cruelty, well—this is war, after all…

Then suddenly he recognized this solder. Standing there in front of him was Gai—thinner and pinched-looking, with his cheeks covered in stubble, wearing a baggy soldier’s coverall. “Gai,” Maxim murmured. “My old friend… Now how can I…” He took his foot off the accelerator and disengaged the clutch, and the tank slowed to a halt. Gai lowered his hand and unhurriedly walked toward it. At that point Maxim actually laughed with joy. Everything was turning out very well. He engaged the clutch again and readied himself.

“Hey!” Gai imperiously shouted, hammering on the armor plating with his rifle butt. “Who are you?”

Maxim said nothing, quietly laughing to himself.

“Is anyone in there?” A note of uncertainty had appeared in Gai’s voice.

Then his metal-tipped boots clattered on the armor plating, the hatch on the left swung open, and Gai stuck his head into the cabin. When he saw Maxim, his mouth dropped open, and at that precise second Maxim grabbed hold of his coverall, jerked him toward himself, dumped him on the branches under his feet, and held him down… The tank roared, then gave an appalling howl and jerked forward. I’ll shatter the engine, thought Maxim.

Gai jerked and started squirming around, and his helmet slipped down over his face so that he couldn’t see anything—he could only blindly kick up his heels as he tried to tug his automatic out from under himself. The control bay was suddenly filled with thunderous clanging—evidently the tank’s rear had been struck by fire from automatic rifles and a machine gun. It wasn’t dangerous, and Maxim watched impatiently as the wall of the forest advanced, coming closer and closer… closer… and there were the first bushes… a check-clad figure frantically darted off the road… and then there was forest on all sides, and there were no more bullets clattering on the armor, and the highway ahead was open for many hundreds and hundreds of miles.

Gai finally managed to drag his automatic out from under himself, but Maxim tore off his helmet, saw his sweaty, scowling face, and laughed when the expression of fury, terror, and thirst to kill was replaced first by confusion, then amazement, and finally joy. Gai moved his lips—evidently he had exclaimed, “Massaraksh!” Maxim let go of the levers, grabbed his wet, emaciated, stubbly-faced friend, and embraced him, squeezing him close in all the fullness of his feelings, then released his grip and, holding Gai by the shoulders, said, “Gai, my great friend, I’m so glad!” Absolutely nothing at all could be heard. He glanced through the observation slit: the highway was still as straight as ever, and he set the manual controls again, clambered up on top, and dragged Gai out after him.

“Massaraksh!” said the creased and crumpled Gai. “It’s you again!”

“But aren’t you glad? I’m so terribly glad!” Maxim had only just realized that he had never wanted to travel to the South on his own.

“What does all of this mean?” Gai shouted. His first joy had already passed, and he was looking around in alarm.

“We’re going to the South!” shouted Maxim. “I’ve had enough of this hospitable fatherland of yours!”

“You’ve escaped?”

“Yes!”

“Have you lost your mind? They gave you your life.”

“What does that mean, they gave it to me? This life is mine! It belongs to me!”

It was hard to talk to each other—they had to shout—and quite unintentionally, instead of a friendly conversation, it turned into a quarrel. Maxim jumped down into the hatch and throttled back the engine. The tank started moving more slowly, but it stopped roaring and clanging so loudly.

When Maxim climbed back out, Gai was sitting there hunched over, in a determined mood. “It’s my duty to take you back,” he declared.

“And it’s my duty to drag you out of that place,” Maxim declared.

“I don’t understand. You’ve gone completely insane. It’s impossible to escape from here. You have to go back… Massaraksh, you can’t go back either, or they’ll shoot you… And in the South they’ll eat you… Damn you and your insanity! Getting involved with you is like picking up a counterfeit coin—”

“Wait, stop yelling,” said Maxim. “Let me explain everything to you.”

“I don’t want to hear it. Stop this thing!”

“Just hang on,” said Maxim. “Let me tell you everything!”

But Gai didn’t want to be told anything. He insisted that this illegally purloined vehicle must immediately be halted and returned to the prison zone. Maxim was called a blockhead twice, three times, and four times. The howl of “massaraksh” drowned out the noise of the motor. The situation, massaraksh, was appalling. It was hopeless, massaraksh! Up ahead, massaraksh, lay certain death. And, massaraksh, it lay behind too. Maxim had always been a blockhead and a crazy freak, massaraksh, but this stunt would probably, massaraksh, be the last he would ever pull…

Maxim didn’t interfere. He had suddenly realized that the radiation field of the final tower obviously ended somewhere around here. Or, more probably, it had already ended—the final checkpoint had to be right on the boundary of the final tower’s range… Let Gai have his say; on the inhabited island words don’t mean anything… Swear away, carry on swearing as long as you like, but I’ll get you out—this isn’t where you belong… I have to start with someone, and you’ll be the first. I don’t want you to be a puppet, not even if you like being a puppet.

After abusing Maxim up, down, and sideways, Gai slipped in through the hatch and started fiddling around down there, trying to halt the tank. He couldn’t do it, and he clambered back out, wearing his helmet now, very taciturn and intent. He was clearly intending to jump off and walk back. He was very angry. Then Maxim caught him by his pant leg, sat him down beside him, and started explaining the situation.

Maxim spoke for more than an hour, occasionally breaking off to adjust the movement of the tank at bends. He talked, and Gai listened. At first Gai tried to interrupt, attempted to jump off as they moved along, and plugged his ears with his fingers, but Maxim just carried on and on talking, repeating the same thing over and over again, explaining, hammering it home, trying to change Gai’s mind. And Gai finally started listening, then he started thinking, started pining, stuck both hands in under his helmet, rapidly scratched his thick thatch of hair, and then suddenly moved on to the attack. He started interrogating Maxim about where he had found out all of this, and who could prove that it wasn’t all a load of lies, and how anyone could believe all of this when it was an obvious fabrication… Maxim hit him with facts, and when the facts weren’t enough, he swore that he was telling the truth, and when that didn’t do any good, he called Gai a dunderhead and a puppet and a robot, and the tank kept on moving farther and farther south, burrowing its way deeper and deeper into the land of the mutants.

“Well, all right,” Maxim eventually said in a fury. “Now, let’s check all of this. According to my calculations, we left the radiation field behind a long time ago, and now it’s about ten minutes to ten. What do you all do at ten o’clock?”

“Ten hundred hours is formation time,” Gai morosely said.

“Exactly. You form up in neat ranks and start howling appalling, idiotic hymns and bursting a gut in your enthusiasm. Remember?”

“The enthusiasm is in our blood,” Gai declared.

“They hammer the enthusiasm into your thick heads,” Maxim retorted. “But OK, now we’ll see just what kind of enthusiasm you’ve got in your blood. What time is it?”

“Seven minutes to ten,” Gai morosely replied.

They traveled on in silence for a while.

“Well?” asked Maxim.

Gai looked at his watch and started singing in an uncertain voice, “The Battle Guards advance with fearsome cries…” Maxim mockingly watched him. Gai lost the thread and got the words confused.

“Stop gawking at me,” he angrily said. “You’re throwing me off. And anyway, what kind of enthusiasm can there be out of formation?”

“Give it up, give it up,” said Maxim. “You used to yell just as loud out of formation. It was frightening to watch you and Uncle Kaan. One yelling ‘The Battle Guards,’ and the other droning ‘Glory to the Fathers.’ And then there was Rada… Well then, where’s your enthusiasm? Where’s your love for the Fathers?”

“Don’t you dare,” said Gai. “Don’t you dare talk that way about the Fathers. Even if your story is true, it simply means that the Fathers have been deceived.”

“So who deceived them?”

“Weeell… It could be anyone…”

“So the Fathers aren’t all-powerful, then? So they don’t know everything?”

“I don’t want to discuss this subject,” Gai declared.

He turned morose and gloomy, and hunched over; his face turned even more pinched-looking, his eyes dimmed, and his lower lip started drooping. Maxim suddenly remembered Fishta the Onion and Handsome Ketri from the convicts’ car. They were drug addicts, individuals habituated to the use of especially strong narcotic substances. They suffered terrible torment without their fix—they didn’t eat or drink and spent days on end sitting like that, with dead eyes and drooping lower lips. “Do you have a pain somewhere?” he asked Gai.

“No,” Gai drearily replied.

“Then why are you all huddled up like that?”

“I don’t know, it’s just…” Gai tugged on his collar and feebly turned his neck. “I’ll lie down for a while, OK?”

Without waiting for Maxim to answer, he climbed in through the hatch and lay down on the twigs, pulling up his legs. So that’s how it is, thought Maxim. It’s not as simple as I thought. He felt worried. Gai didn’t get his blast of radiation, we left the field almost two hours ago… He’s lived in that field all his life… So maybe it’s harmful for him to be without it? What if he falls ill? Of all the lousy things…

Looking in through the hatch at Gai’s pale face, he felt more and more frightened. Eventually he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he jumped down into the control bay, switched off the engine, dragged Gai out, and laid him on the grass beside the highway.

Gai slept, muttering something in his sleep and intensely shivering. Then he started shuddering as if he had a fever, hunching up and huddling tight, thrusting his hands in under his armpits as if he was trying to get warm. Maxim put Gai’s head on his knees, squeezed Gai’s temples with his fingers, and tried to concentrate. It had been a long time since he had given anyone a psychomassage, but he knew that the most important thing was to empty your mind of everything else and try to focus on including the sick person in your own healthy system. He sat there like that for ten or fifteen minutes, and when he surfaced, he saw that Gai was better: his face had turned pink, his breathing was regular, and he wasn’t feeling cold any longer. Maxim made him a pillow of grass and sat there for a while, wafting away the mosquitoes, then remembered that they still had to travel on and on, and the reactor was leaking, which was dangerous for Gai, so he had to think of something. He got up and went back to the tank.

After some heavy fumbling and fiddling, he finally wrested several sheets of the side armor plating off their rusty rivets and packed these sheets against the ceramic partition separating the reactor and the motor from the control bay. He still had to attach the final sheet when he suddenly sensed that strangers had appeared nearby. When he cautiously stuck his head out of the hatch, all his insides turned cold and clenched up in a knot.

Standing on the highway, about ten paces in front of the tank, were three men, but he didn’t immediately realize that they were men. Certainly, they were wearing clothes, and two of them were holding a pole on their shoulders, with a small hoofed animal that looked like a deer hanging from it and its bloodied head dangling down, and the third one had a bulky rifle of an unfamiliar type hanging across his pigeon chest from his neck. Mutants, thought Maxim. There they are—mutants…

All the stories and legends that he had heard suddenly welled up in his memory, seeming very believable. They skin people alive… cannibals… savages… animals. He clenched his teeth, jumped up onto the armor plating, and stood at his full height. Then the one with the rifle comically shifted his short little bowed legs but didn’t move from the spot. He merely raised his terrifying hand with its two long, many-jointed fingers, gave a loud hiss, and then asked in a squeaky voice, “Hungry?”

Maxim parted his glued lips and said “Yes.”

“You won’t shoot?” the owner of the rifle inquired.

“No,” said Maxim, smiling. “Absolutely not, no way.”

15

Gai sat at the crude homemade table, cleaning his automatic rifle. It was about fifteen minutes after ten in the morning, the world was gray, colorless and dry, there was no place in it for joy, there was no place for the movement of life, and everything was lackluster and sickly. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want to see or hear anything, he didn’t even want to sleep—he wanted to simply lay his head down on the table, sink into despair, and die. Just die—that was all.

The room was small, with a single window that had no glass in it, looking out onto an immense grayish-brown wasteland cluttered with ruins and overgrown with wild bushes. The wallpaper in the room was faded, withered, and curled up at the edges—either from the heat or from age. The parquet flooring was dry and cracked, and in one corner it had been scorched into charcoal. Nothing from the former inhabitants remained in the room, apart from a large photograph lying under broken glass, in which, if you looked closely, it was possible to make out an old gentleman with idiotic sideburns, wearing a ludicrous hat that looked like a tin plate.

Gai wished his eyes had never seen any of this, he wished he could just die on the spot or howl like a desolate stray dog, but Maxim had told him, “Clean your gun!” “Every time,” Maxim had said, tapping on the table with a finger of stone, “every time it starts getting to you, sit down and clean your rifle.” So he had to clean it. It was Maxim, after all. If not for Maxim, he really would have lain down and died.

He had begged Maxim, “Don’t leave right now, stay a while and treat me, help me with it.” But no. Maxim had said that Gai must do it himself now. He’d said that it wasn’t fatal, that it should pass, and it was bound to pass, but Gai had to brace himself, he had to cope… OK, Gai thought feebly, I’ll manage. It’s Maxim, after all. Not a man, not one of the Fathers, not a god, but Maxim…

And Maxim had also said, “Be angry! As soon as it starts tormenting you, remember where you got this from, who got you hooked like this and what for, and be angry, store up your hate. You’ll need it soon—you’re not the only one like this, there are forty million of you, duped and poisoned…” It was hard to believe, massaraksh, they’d spent all their life in formation, they’d always known what was what, who was their friend, who was their enemy, everything was simple, the path ahead was clear, they were all together, and it was good to be one of the millions, the same as everyone else. But no, he came along, made Gai love him, ruined Gai’s career, and then literally tore him out of the ranks by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away into a different life with goals that were incomprehensible, and means for achieving them that were incomprehensible, and you had to think—massaraksh and massaraksh—about everything for yourself! Gai had never had any idea before of what that was like—thinking for yourself. There was an order, and everything was clear: think about the best way of carrying it out.

Yes… he dragged me out by the scruff of the neck, turned my face back toward my old nest, toward everything that was dearest of all to me, and showed me it was a garbage heap, a pile of shit, an abomination, lies… And when I looked, there really wasn’t much that was beautiful about it; it made me feel sick to remember myself, to remember the guys, and as for Mr. Cornet Chachu! Gai angrily drove the breechblock into place and clicked the catch shut. And once again he was overwhelmed by weariness and apathy, and he didn’t have any willpower left to load the magazine. He felt bad, oh so bad…

The warped, creaking door swung open, and an eager little face was thrust in—actually quite a pretty, likable face, if not for the bald cranium and the inflamed eyelids with no lashes. “Uncle Mak said you should go to the square. Everybody’s already gotten together, they’re only waiting for you!”

Gai morosely squinted at her, at that spindly little body in a little dress of coarse sackcloth, at the abnormally thin little arms, like straws, covered with brown blotches, at the crooked little legs, swollen at the knees, and he felt nauseous, and he felt ashamed of his own revulsion—a child, and who was to blame? He looked away and said, “I’m not going. Tell him I don’t feel well. I’ve fallen ill.”

The door creaked, and when he looked up again, the little girl was gone. He flung his rifle onto the bed in annoyance, walked over to the window, and stuck his head out. The little girl was racing at ferocious speed along the hollow that used to be a street, raising dust between the remains of walls. A plump little toddler tagged along behind her, stumbled in pursuit for a few small steps, got hooked on something, flopped down onto the ground, raised his head, and lay there for while, then started roaring in a terrible, deep bass voice. The mother darted out from behind the ruins. Gai hastily staggered back, shook his head, and went back to the table. No, I can’t get used to it. I’m obviously a despicable kind of person… Well, if I had the guy who’s responsible for all of this in front of me, I wouldn’t miss. But all the same, why can’t I get used to it? Oh God, all the things I’ve seen in just this one month—enough for a hundred nightmares…

The mutants lived in small communities. Some of them roamed from place to place, hunting and searching for somewhere a bit better, looking for roads to the north that skirted around the Guards’ machine guns and the terrible areas where they went insane and died on the spot from attacks of horrendous headaches. Some of them lived a settled life on farms and in villages that had survived after the battles and the detonation of three atomic bombs, one of which had exploded above this city, and two in the outskirts—there were miles-long bald patches of slag that gleamed like mirrors out there now. The settled farmers sowed small, degenerated strains of wheat, tended their strange vegetable patches in which the tomatoes were like berries and the berries were like tomatoes, and bred and raised hideous cattle that were frightening to look at, let alone to eat. They were a pitiful people: mutants, wild southern degenerates, about whom all sorts of crazy, fantastic stories were told and who talked all sorts of crazy, fantastic nonsense themselves—quiet, sickly, mutilated caricatures of people. The only normal ones here were the old folks, but very few of them were left; they were all sick and doomed to die soon. Their children and grandchildren also looked as if they weren’t long for this world. They had a lot of children, but almost all of them died either at birth or in infancy. Those who did survive were weak and constantly plagued by unknown illnesses, and they were terribly ugly, but they all seemed obedient, quiet, and intelligent.

In fact, there was no doubt about it—these mutants had turned out to be decent people, kind and hospitable, peaceable… Only it was impossible to look at them. Even Maxim had been repulsed at first, until he got used to it, but he had gotten used to it quickly. It was easy for him—he was the master of his own nature…

Gai loaded the magazine into the rifle, propped his cheek on his palm, and started pondering. Yes, Maxim…

Of course, the venture Maxim was planning this time was clearly pointless. He had resolved to gather the mutants together, arm them, and drive the Guards back, at least beyond the Blue Serpent River just for a start. God, but it was funny. They could hardly walk, many of them died as they were simply walking along—one of them could die just from lifting a sack of grain—and Maxim wanted to go up against the Guards with them. Untrained, weak, timid—what good were they? Even if he gathered together those… those scouts of theirs, a single cornet would be enough to deal with their army if they didn’t have Maxim. And even if Maxim was there, a cornet with a company would be enough.

I think Maxim himself understands that. But he spent an entire month rushing through the forest from village to village, from community to community, trying to persuade the old folks and respected people, the ones that the communities listen to. He ran around and dragged me around with him everywhere; it’s impossible to calm him down. The old folks don’t want to go, and they won’t let the scouts go… And now I’ve got to go to this council meeting. I’m not going.

The world turned a bit brighter. It was no longer quite so sickening to look around, the blood started coursing through his veins a bit faster, and he felt a vague stirring of hope that today’s meeting would fall through, that Maxim would come back and say, That’s enough, there’s nothing more for us to do here, and they would move on farther south, into the desert, where mutants were also said to live, but not such horrific ones, more like human beings, and not so sickly. It was even said that they had something like a state there, and even an army. Maybe it would be possible to reach some kind of realistic agreement with them… Of course, everything there was radioactive—the word was that bombs had been piled on top of each other there, especially to pollute the region… They even said there were special bombs to do it.

Remembering about the radioactivity, Gai reached into his duffel bag and took out a little box of yellow tablets. Popping two of them into his mouth, he winced and made a face at the intensely bitter taste. Damn it, what disgusting garbage, but I have to take them here—everything here’s polluted too. And in the desert I’ll probably have to suck them by the handful… But anyway, my thanks to the duke-prince; without these pills, I’d be a goner here. That duke-prince is a great guy, he doesn’t get distressed or give in to despair in this hell, he treats people, he helps them, he makes his rounds, and he’s organized an entire medication factory. And by the way, he said that the Land of the Fathers is only a small piece, merely the rump of our former great empire, and there used to be a different capital two hundred miles farther south—they say the ruins of it are still there, and they’re magnificent too, so they say…

The door swung open and Maxim walked in, angry and naked, wearing nothing but his black shorts; he was lean and quick, and it was obvious that he was furious. When Gai saw him, he put on a sulky face and started looking out the window.

“Right, stop making things up,” said Maxim. “Let’s go.”

“I don’t want to,” said Gai, “Damn them all. It turns my stomach. It’s unbearable.”

“Nonsense,” Maxim retorted. “They’re fine people, and they respect you a lot. Don’t be such a little kid.”

“Oh, sure, they respect me,” said Gai.

“Yes they do, and how! The other day the duke-prince was asking if you could stay here. ‘I’ll die soon,’ he said. ‘I need a real man to take my place.’”

“Oh, sure, take his place…” Gai growled, but he could feel everything inside himself softening, even against his own will.

“And Boshku keeps pestering me too—he’s afraid of approaching you directly. ‘Let Gai stay here,’ he says. ‘He can teach people and protect them; he’ll train up good kids…’ Do you know the way Boshku talks?”

Gai blushed in pleasure, cleared his throat, and, still frowning and looking out the window, replied, “Oh, all right… Should I bring my rifle?

“Yes,” said Maxim. “You can never tell.”

Gai took his rifle under his arm and they walked out of the room—Gai leading, with Maxim close on his heels—then went down the crumbling staircase, stepped over a heap of little children messing around in the dust of the doorway, and set off along the street toward the square. Agh! Street, square… Nothing but words. The number of people who were killed here! They say there used to be a big, beautiful city here: theaters, a circus, museums, dog racing… and they say the churches here were especially beautiful—people used to come from all over the world to look at them—but now there’s nothing but trash and no way of telling what used to be where. Instead of the circus there’s a swamp with crocodiles in it, there used to be a subway system but now it’s got ghouls in it, and it’s dangerous to walk around in the city at night… They destroyed the country, the bastards. And they didn’t just kill people, they mutilated them too—and they bred all sorts of creatures of darkness here that were never here before. And not just here, either…

The duke-prince had told him that before the war animals that looked like dogs used to live in the forests. He had forgotten what they were called, but they were intelligent beasts, and very good-natured—they understood everything and they could be trained; they were a real joy. Well, so of course they started training them for military purposes: lying down under tanks with mines, dragging out the wounded, carrying dishes infected with plague over to the enemy, and all sorts of nonsense like that. And then a smart guy turned up who deciphered their language—it turned out that they did have a language, and quite a complex one. And in general they were very fond of imitating, and the way their larynx was formed meant that some of them could even be taught to speak a human language—not the entire language, of course, but they could remember about fifty or seventy words.

“Anyway, they were remarkable animals,” the duke-prince had said. “We ought to have been friends with them, learned from each other, and helped each other—supposedly they were dying out. Ah, but no, they were used for fighting, trained to go to the enemy and collect military information. And then the war began and nobody had any more time for them, or for anything else either. And that’s how we got the ghouls. They’re mutants too, only not human but animal—very dangerous creatures.” In the Special Southern District there was even an official order to wage an armed campaign against them, and the duke-prince had said quite bluntly, “We’re all done for, and then there’ll be nobody but ghouls living here…”

Gai recalled how one day in the forest Boshku and his hunters had brought down a deer that was being hunted by ghouls, and a fight had begun. But what kind of fighters are the mutants? They fired one shot each with their antiquated rifles, dropped their weapons, and sat down and put their hands over their eyes so they wouldn’t see each other being torn apart, didn’t they? And, I must say, Maxim was at a loss too… Well, not exactly at a loss, but somehow… he just didn’t want to fight. So I had to do the job for all of them. When my clip ran out, I used the rifle butt. It was a good thing there weren’t many ghouls, only six of them. Two were killed, one got away, and three were wounded and stunned—we tied them up and were going to take them back to the village in the morning to be executed. But during the night I spotted Maxim stealthily getting up, and he went over to them. He sat with them for a while, healing them the way he knows how, by laying on his hands. Then he untied them and, of course, not being stupid, they cut and ran, disappeared in a flash. I said to him, “Why did you do that, Mak, what for?” “I don’t really know,” he said. “I just feel we shouldn’t execute them. We shouldn’t execute people,” he said, “and we shouldn’t execute these either… They’re not dogs,” he said, “and they’re not any kind of ghouls…”

And it’s not just the ghouls! The bats here are just incredible! The kind that serve the Sorcerer… They’re horror on wings, not bats! And who is it that wanders through the villages at night with an ax, stealing children? And he doesn’t even come into the house, but the children go out to him while they’re asleep, without waking up… Let’s suppose all that’s just lies, but I’ve seen a few things for myself. I remember as if it were yesterday the time the duke-prince took us to see the closest entrance to the Fortress. We got there, and there was a peaceful, green little meadow, a little hill, and a cave in the hill. We looked, and—Lord Almighty!—the entire meadow in front of the entrance was piled high with dead ghouls, about twenty of them at least, and they weren’t mutilated or wounded—there wasn’t a single drop of blood on the grass. And then—the most amazing thing of all—Maxim examined them and said, “They’re not dead, they’re caught in some kind of seizure, as if someone hypnotized them…” The question is, who?

Yes, these are uncanny places. A man can only go out in the daytime here, and even then he has to be wary. If not for Maxim, I’d have bolted out of here, shown the place a clean pair of heels. But if I’m really being honest, where would I run to? With this forest on all sides, and the forest’s full of creatures of darkness, and the tank’s sunk in a swamp… Run back to my own people? What could be more natural than to run back to your own kind? But they’re not my own kind any longer, are they? If you think about it, they’re monsters and puppets too, Maxim’s right about that. What kind of people are they, if they can be controlled like machines? No, that’s not for me. It’s repulsive…

They walked out into the square, a large vacant lot with a black, half-melted monument to some long-forgotten public figure bizarrely jutting up at its center, and turned toward a small building that had survived, where the representatives usually gathered to swap rumors and consult about the sowing season or the hunting, or else simply to sit for a while, dozing and listening to the duke-prince’s stories about the old times.

The men had already gathered in the small building, in a large, clean room. Gai didn’t want to look at anybody here. Not even the duke-prince—supposedly not a mutant, just a man. Even he was mutilated: his entire face was covered in burns and scars. They walked in, greeted everyone, and sat down in the circle, right there on the floor. Boshku, sitting beside the stove, took his metal teapot off the coals and poured them each a cup of tea—strong and good, but without any sugar. Gai took his cup—an exceptionally beautiful, priceless piece of royal porcelain—and put it down in front of him, then set the butt of his automatic rifle on the floor between his feet, leaned his forehead against the ribbed barrel, and closed his eyes, in order not to see anyone.

The consultation was opened by the duke-prince. He was no prince, and no duke either, but he was a medical service colonel, the surgeon-in-chief of the Southern Fortress. When they started pounding the Fortress with atomic bombs, the garrison had mutinied and hung out a white flag (which their own side immediately pulverized with a thermonuclear bomb). The genuine prince and commander was torn to pieces by the soldiers, who got carried away and killed all the officers, and then suddenly realized that there was nobody to command, and they couldn’t get by without a command structure: the war was still going on, the enemy was attacking, their side was attacking, and none of the soldiers knew the plan of the Fortress, so now it was a gigantic mousetrap, and then the bacteriological bombs exploded—the entire arsenal of them—and plague broke out. Well, in short, half the garrison scattered every which way, three-quarters of the half who were left died, and the surgeon-in-chief accepted command of the remainder—the soldiers hadn’t touched him during the mutiny—he was a doctor, after all. Somehow it became the custom to call him either “prince” or “duke,” at first as a joke, and then everyone got used to it, and to avoid any confusion, Maxim called him the duke-prince.

“Friends!” said the duke-prince. “We have to discuss proposals from our friend Mak. These are very important proposals. Just how important they are, you can judge at least from the fact that the Sorcerer himself has come to join us and might perhaps talk to us…”

Gai raised his head. It was true: the Sorcerer himself was sitting in the corner, leaning back against the wall. It was terrifying to look at him, and impossible not to look. He was a remarkable personality. Even Maxim regarded him with respect, and he had told Gai, “The Sorcerer, brother, is an important figure.” The Sorcerer was short, thickset, and neat, his arms and legs were short but strong, and in general he wasn’t really very deformed, or at least the word deformed didn’t suit him. He had an enormous cranium covered with coarse, dense hair that looked like silvery fur, and a small mouth with the lips folded in a strange manner, as if he were constantly preparing to whistle through his teeth, and in general his face was actually quite thin, but there were bags under his eyes, and the eyes themselves were long and narrow, with vertical pupils, like a snake’s. He didn’t talk much, only rarely appeared in public, and lived alone in a basement at the far end of the city, but he possessed enormous authority because of his amazing abilities.

First, he was very intelligent and he knew everything, although he was only about twenty years old and he had never been anywhere except this city. When questions of any kind came up, people went hat in hand to him for an answer. As a rule, he didn’t give any answer, which signified that the question was trivial, and whichever way it was decided, everything would be fine. But if the question was vitally important—concerning the weather, or when to sow the crops—he always gave his advice, and he had never yet been mistaken. Only the elders went to see him, and they always kept quiet about what happened, but it was commonly believed that even when giving advice, the Sorcerer never opened his mouth. He just looked at you, and it became clear what had to be done.

Second, he had power over animals. He never asked the community for food or clothing; everything was brought to him by animals, various kinds of animals—forest beasts and insects and frogs—and his primary servants were huge bats. Rumor had it that he could talk to them, and they understood him and obeyed him.

Furthermore, people said that he knew the unknowable. It was impossible to understand what this unknowable was; in Gai’s opinion, it was no more than a collection of empty words: the Black, Empty World before the birth of the World Light; the Black, Icy World after the extinction of the World Light; the Endless Void with many different World Lights… Nobody could explain what all of this meant, but Mak merely shook his head and murmured admiringly, “Now there’s a real intellect!”

The Sorcerer sat there, not looking at anybody, with a half-blind night bird awkwardly shifting its feet on his shoulder. Every now and then the Sorcerer took little pieces of something out of his pocket and thrust them into its beak, and then it froze for a second, before throwing its head back and swallowing with an apparent effort, craning its neck.

“These are very important proposals,” the duke-prince continued, “so I ask you to listen attentively. And you, Boshku, my old friend, brew the tea good and strong, because I can see that some of us are already dozing off. Don’t doze off, you mustn’t do that. Summon up your strength—maybe our fate is being decided at this very moment…”

The meeting started muttering in approval. A character with chalky-white irises was dragged away from the wall by the ears because he had arranged himself there for a doze, and was seated in the front row. “Why, I wasn’t doing anything,” the white-eyed character muttered. “It was only going to be, you know, just for a little bit. I mean, people shouldn’t speak for so long, or else before they reach the end, I’ve already forgotten the beginning.”

“All right,” the duke-prince agreed. “Then we’ll keep it short. The soldiers are driving us south, into the desert. They give no quarter and don’t enter into negotiations. Of the families who have tried to get through to the north, nobody has returned. We must assume that they perished. This means that in ten or fifteen years they will finally squeeze us out into the desert, and we’ll die there without any food and water. They say that people live in the desert too—I don’t believe that, but many respected leaders do, and they claim that the inhabitants of the desert are every bit as cruel and bloodthirsty as the soldiers. But we are peace-loving people, we don’t know how to fight. Many of us are dying, and we probably won’t live to see the final outcome, but as of this moment we govern the people and we are obliged to think not just about ourselves but about our children… Boshku,” he said, “please give our esteemed colleague Baker some tea. I think Baker has fallen asleep.”

Baker was woken up and a hot cup was thrust into his blotchy hand. He burned his fingers and hissed, and the duke-prince continued: “Our friend Mak is proposing a way out. He came to us from the side of the soldiers. He hates the soldiers and says no mercy can be expected from them—they are all bamboozled by tyrants and burning with desire to exterminate us. At first Mak wanted to arm us and lead us into battle, but he realized that we are weak and we can’t fight. So then he decided to make his way to the inhabitants of the desert—he believes in them too—reach an arrangement with them, and lead them against the soldiers. What is required from us? To give our blessing to this plan, allow the inhabitants of the desert to pass through our lands, and provide them with food while the war is going on. And our friend Mak also suggests that we should we give him permission to gather together all our scouts who wish to help, and he will teach them how to fight and lead them to the north to raise a rebellion there. So that, in brief, is how things stand. Now we have to decide, and I ask you to express your opinions.”

Gai squinted sideways at Maxim. His friend Mak sat there with his legs drawn up under him, huge and brown, as motionless as a cliff—or not even a cliff but a gigantic battery, ready to discharge all its energy in a single moment. He was looking into the farthest corner, at the Sorcerer, but he immediately sensed Gai’s glance and turned his head toward him. And then Gai suddenly thought that his friend Mak wasn’t the same as he was before. He remembered that it had been ages now since Mak smiled his celebrated blinding-white, idiotic smile, it had been ages now since he sang his Highland songs, and his eyes had lost their former tenderness and genial humor—his eyes had become hard and glassy somehow, as if he wasn’t even Maxim but Mr. Cornet Chachu. And Gai also remembered that it had been a long time now since Mak stopped dashing into all the corners like a jolly, curious dog; he had become reserved, and a kind of severity had appeared in him, a kind of single-minded purposefulness, an adult, practical focus, as if he was aiming himself at some target that only he could see. Mak had changed very, very much since the time when the full clip of a heavy army pistol had been emptied into him. He used to feel compassion for absolutely everybody, but now he didn’t feel compassion for anybody. Well, maybe that was how it ought to be… But this was a terrible plan he had come up with. There would be slaughter, a huge massacre…

“There’s something I don’t understand here,” piped up a bald freak, whose clothes suggested that he wasn’t a local man. “What is it he wants? For the barbarians to come here? Why, they’ll kill all of us. I know what the barbarians are like, don’t I? They’ll kill everyone—they won’t leave a single man alive.”

“They’ll come here in peace,” said Mak, “or they won’t come at all.”

“Then it’s better if they don’t come at all,” the bald man said. “It’s best to steer well clear of the barbarians. Better to go and face the soldiers’ machine guns. At least that’s still a bit like dying by your own hand. My father was a soldier.”

“That’s right, of course,” Boshku mused. “But then, on the other hand, the barbarians could drive the soldiers away and leave us alone. Then things would be good.”

“And why would they leave us alone all of a sudden?” the white-eyed man objected. “Since time out of mind no one’s ever left us alone. Why would they start now, all of a sudden?”

“Well, he’ll arrange things with them, won’t he?” Boshku explained. “Leave the forest folk alone, he’ll say, and that’s all, otherwise don’t come, he’ll say…”

“Who will? Who’ll arrange things with them?” asked Baker, swinging his head from side to side.

“Why, Mak will. Mak will arrange things.”

“Ah, Mak… Well, if Mak arranges things with them, then maybe they really will leave us alone.”

“Shall I give you some tea?” asked Boshku. “You’re falling asleep, Baker.”

“I don’t want any of your tea.”

“Come on, have some tea, just a cup, it’s not like we’re asking you to wash your neck, is it?”

The white-eyed man suddenly got up. “I’ll be going,” he said. “Nothing will come of this. They’ll kill Mak, and they won’t have any pity on us either. Why would they have any pity on us? We’re all done for in ten years or so anyway. No children have been born in my community for two years now. Live in peace until we die, that’s the long and the short of it. So you decide what you think is best. It’s all the same to me.”

He walked out, crooked and awkward, stumbling over the doorstep.

“Yes, Mak,” said Leech, shaking his head. “Forgive us, but we don’t trust anybody. How can we trust the barbarians? They live in the desert, they munch on sand and wash it down with sand. They’re terrible people, all twisted together out of iron wire—they don’t know how to cry or how to laugh. What are we to them? Moss under their feet. So they’ll come, they’ll beat the soldiers and settle here, and they’ll burn down the forest, of course… What do they want with a forest? They love the desert. And we’re done for again. No, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it, Mak. Your idea’s worthless.”

“Yes,” said Baker. “We don’t need this, Mak. Let us die in peace, leave us alone. You hate the soldiers and you want to crush them, but what has that got to do with us? We don’t feel hate for anybody. Feel compassion for us, Mak. Nobody has ever felt any compassion for us. Even you, although you’re a good man—even you don’t feel any compassion for us… You don’t, do you, Mak, eh?”

Gai looked at Mak again and lowered his eyes in embarrassment. Maxim had blushed, blushed so hard that tears had sprung to his eyes. He hung his head and put his hands over his face. “It’s not true,” he said. “I do feel compassion for you. But not only for you. I—”

“Oh nooo, Mak,” Baker insistently said. “Feel compassion only for us. We’re the most unfortunate people in the whole world, after all, and you know it. Forget about your hate. Feel compassion, and that’s all.”

“But why should he feel any compassion?” piped up Filbert, smothered right up to his eyes in dirty bandages. “He’s a soldier himself. When have soldiers ever had compassion for us? The soldier hasn’t been born yet who would feel compassion for us.”

“Dear friends, dear friends!” the duke-prince said in a stern voice. “Mak is our friend. He wishes us well—he wants to destroy our enemies.”

“But the way it turns out is like this,” said the bald freak who wasn’t local, “even if we assume that the barbarians are stronger than the soldiers. They’ll give the soldiers a drubbing, destroy their cursed towers, and occupy all of the North. Let them. We don’t mind. Let them fight up there. But what good do we get out of it? That’ll be the end of us; there’ll be barbarians in the south, and barbarians in the north too, and more of the same barbarians on top of us. They don’t need us, and since they don’t need us, they’ll just exterminate us. That’s one thing.

“Now let’s suppose that the soldiers fight the barbarians off. If they fight the barbarians off, the war will roll right over us to the south. And what then? We’re finished that way too; soldiers in the north, soldiers in the south, and soldiers on top of us too. Well, and we know soldiers…”

The meeting started droning and buzzing, saying that was right, the bald freak had laid things out precisely and correctly, but the bald man wasn’t finished yet.

“Let me finish!” he indignantly exclaimed. “Why have you started kicking up such a racket, really and truly? It could also happen that the barbarians kill all the soldiers, and the soldiers kill all the barbarians. That seems just right—we can carry on living. Ah, but no, that won’t work either. Because there are still the ghouls. While the soldiers are alive, the ghouls hide, they’re afraid of a bullet, the soldiers have been ordered to shoot ghouls. But when there are no more soldiers, that’s total ruination for us. The ghouls will gobble us up, bones and all.”

The meeting was extremely impressed by this idea. “He speaks true!” voices cried out. “Well, I never, what smart heads they have in the swamps…” “Yes, brothers, we forgot all about the ghouls… but they’re wakeful all right, biding their time…” “We don’t need anything, Mak, let things go on like they are…” “We’ve scraped by for twenty years, we’ll hang on for another twenty, and then maybe another…”

“And we mustn’t let our scouts go!” said the bald freak, raising his voice. “It makes no difference what they want… What’s it to them? They don’t live at home. Six Toes spends days and nights on the other side, shameful to say, robbing and drinking vodka. It’s all right for them, they’re not afraid of the towers, their heads don’t hurt. But what about the community? The game animals are moving north—who’s going to drive them back down to us from up there if not the scouts? We can’t let him have them. And we need to clamp down hard on them, they’ve gotten spoiled rotten… They commit murders up there, they kidnap soldiers and torture them like some kind of beasts. We’ve can’t let them go. They’ll run completely wild.”

“Don’t let them go, don’t let them go,” the meeting affirmed. “How can we manage without them?” “And we’ve fed them, we bore them and raised them, they ought to realize that, but they don’t care, they’re always looking around for a chance to cut loose…”

The bald freak finally calmed down, took his seat, and started greedily gulping down his cold tea. The meeting calmed down too and went quiet. The old folks sat there completely still, trying not to look at Maxim.

Dejectedly nodding his head, Boshku said, “My, my, what an unhappy life we have! No salvation from anywhere. And what did we ever do to anyone?”

“We should never have been born, that’s what,” said Filbert. “They didn’t think before they had us, it was the wrong time…” He held out his empty cup. “And we’re wrong to have children. Just for them to die. Yes, yes, for them to die.”

“The equilibrium…” a loud, hoarse voice suddenly declared. “I already told you that, Mak. You didn’t want to understand me…”

They couldn’t tell where the voice came from. Nobody said anything, keeping their eyes morosely lowered. Only the bird on the Sorcerer’s shoulder carried on shifting its feet and opening and closing its yellow beak. The Sorcerer himself was sitting absolutely still, with his eyes closed and his thin, dry lips pressed together.

“But now, I hope, you have understood,” the bird seemed to continue. “You wish to disrupt this equilibrium. Well now, that is possible. It lies within your power. But the question is: What for? Will anyone ask you to do it? You have made the correct choice, you have consulted with the most pitiful and the most unfortunate, the people who have drawn the most onerous lot of all in this equilibrium. But even they do not wish to see the equilibrium disrupted. Then what is it that motivates you?”

The bird ruffled up its feathers and tucked its head under its wing, but the voice carried on, and now Gai realized that it was the Sorcerer himself speaking, without opening his lips, and without moving a single muscle in his face. Gai found this very frightening, and so did everyone else in the meeting, even the duke-prince. Maxim was the only one who looked at the Sorcerer with a sullen and oddly challenging air.

“The impatience of an agitated conscience!” the Sorcerer declared. “Your conscience has been pampered by constant attention—it starts groaning at the slightest discomfort, and your reason respectfully bows down to it, instead of shouting at it and putting it in its place. Your conscience is outraged by the existing order of things, and with obedient haste your reason seeks ways to change this order. But the order has its own laws. These laws derive from the aspirations of immense masses of people, and they can only change with a change in those aspirations… And so on the one hand we have the aspirations of immense masses of people, and on the other hand your conscience, the embodiment of your own aspirations. Your conscience urges you to change the existing order—that is, to transgress the laws of this order, which are determined by the aspirations of the masses; that is, to change the aspirations of masses of millions of people to match the image and likeness of your aspirations. This is ludicrous and antihistorical. Your reason, clouded and deafened by your conscience, has lost its ability to distinguish the real good of the masses from the imaginary good dictated by your conscience. And reason that has ceased to distinguish the real from the imaginary is no longer reason. Reason must be kept pure. If you do not wish or are unable to do that, then so much the worse for you. And not only for you.

“You will tell me that in the world from which you came, people cannot live without a clear conscience. Well then, cease living. That is also not a bad solution—for you and for everyone else.”

The Sorcerer stopped talking, and all heads turned to look at Maxim. Gai hadn’t entirely comprehended what this pronouncement was all about. It was evidently an echo of some old argument. And it was also clear that the Sorcerer considered Maxim to be an intelligent but willful individual, who acted more out of caprice than out of necessity. That was hurtful. Maxim was a strange character, of course, but he never spared himself and always wished everyone well—not out of some kind of caprice but out of genuinely profound conviction. Of course, forty million people befuddled by radiation didn’t want any changes, but they were befuddled, weren’t they? It wasn’t fair…

“I cannot agree with you,” Maxim said in a cool voice. “With its pain, my conscience sets goals, and my reason realizes them. My conscience determines ideals; my reason seeks for the paths to them. That is the function of reason—to seek for paths. Without conscience, reason works only for itself, which means it works to no purpose. And as for the contradiction between my aspirations and those of the masses, there is a definite ideal: a human being should be free, both spiritually and physically. In this world the masses are not yet aware of this ideal, and the path to it is a painful one. But a start has to be made sometime. It is precisely those with an acutely sensitive conscience who must agitate the masses, not permit them to slumber in the brutish condition of cattle, and raise them up for the struggle against oppression. Even if the masses do not feel this oppression.”

“Correct,” the Sorcerer agreed with surprising readiness. “Conscience does indeed set ideals. But ideals are called ideals because they stand in stark contrast to reality. And therefore, when reason sets to work—cold, calm reason—it starts searching for the means to realize ideals, and it turns out that these means will not fit within the frameworks of the ideals, and these frameworks have to be expanded, and conscience has to be slightly stretched, adjusted, and accommodated…

“This is all that I wish to say, this is all that I repeat to you: you should not mollycoddle your conscience, you should expose it as often as possible to the dusty draft of new reality, and not be afraid that little blotches or a coarse crust might appear on it… But then, you understand this yourself. You have simply not yet learned to call things by their own names. But you will learn to do that too.

“Well, so your conscience has proclaimed a task: to overthrow the tyranny of these Unknown Fathers. Your reason has calculated how things stand and given you its advice: since the tyranny cannot be blown up from within, we shall strike at it from the outside, we shall throw the barbarians against it… Let the forest folk be trampled, let the channel of the Blue Serpent be dammed with corpses, let there be a great war, which might, perhaps, lead to the overthrow of the tyrants—all for the sake of a noble ideal. Well then, your conscience has said with a slight frown, I shall have to grow a little coarser for the sake of the great cause.”

“Massaraksh…” hissed Maxim, redder and more furious than Gai had ever seen him before! “Yes, massaraksh! Yes! Everything is exactly as you say! But what else can be done? On the other side of the Blue Serpent forty million people have been transformed into walking blocks of wood. Forty million slaves…”

“That’s right, that’s right,” said the Sorcerer. “But it’s a different matter that the plan is inappropriate in and of itself: the barbarians will shatter against the towers and roll back, and in general our poor scouts are not capable of doing anything serious. But within the framework of this same plan, you could have contacted, for instance, the Island Empire…

“Although that is not what I mean to say. I’m afraid you simply arrived too late, Mak. You should have come here about fifty years ago, before there were any towers, before there was a war, when there was still some hope of conveying your ideals to the millions… But now there is no such hope, now the age of the towers has begun… unless you drag those millions here one by one, as you dragged this boy with a gun away…

“Only do not think that I am trying to dissuade you. I can see very clearly that you are a force. And your appearance here signifies of itself the inevitable collapse of the equilibrium on the surface of our little sphere. Act. But do not let your conscience hinder you from thinking clearly, and do not let your reason be embarrassed when conscience must be set aside… And I also advise you to remember this: I do not know how things are in your world, but in ours no power remains without a master for long. Someone always appears who will attempt to tame it and subordinate it to himself—either furtively or on some plausible pretext… That is all I wished to say.”

The Sorcerer got to his feet with surprising agility, and the bird on his shoulder squatted down and spread out its wings. He slithered along the wall on his short little legs and disappeared through the door. And the entire gathering immediately set out after him. They walked away, moaning and groaning, still not having really understood what had been said but clearly pleased that everything had remained as it was, that the Sorcerer had forbidden the dangerous plan, that the Sorcerer had shown compassion for them, that he had stuck up for them, and now they could live out their lives in the way they had been doing. After all, they had an entire eternity still ahead of them—ten years, or even more than that.

The last to plod away was Boshku, with his empty teapot, and Gai, Mak, and the duke-prince were the only ones left in the room, apart from Baker, who was slumbering soundly in the corner, exhausted by his intellectual efforts. Gai’s head felt bleary and confused, and so did his heart. The only thing he had clearly understood was this: My poor life, for the first half of it I was just a puppet, a wooden doll in somebody else’s hands, and now I’ll obviously have to live out the second half as a wanderer with no homeland, no friends, and no tomorrow…

“Are you offended, Mak?” the duke-prince asked with a guilty air.

“No, not really,” Maxim replied. “More the opposite, in fact: what I feel is relief. The Sorcerer’s right, my conscience isn’t ready yet for undertakings like this. I probably need to do a bit more wandering and looking. Train my conscience a bit…” He gave a strangely disagreeable laugh. “What can you suggest to me, Duke-Prince?”

The old duke-prince got up with a grunt and started walking around the room, rubbing his stiff sides. “In the first place, I don’t advise you to go on into the desert,” he said. “Whether there are barbarians there or not, you won’t find anything to suit your needs down there. Maybe it is worthwhile to take the Sorcerer’s advice and establish contact with the Islanders, although, as God is my witness, I don’t know how to do that. Probably you have to go to the sea and start from there… if the Islanders aren’t just another myth, and if they want to talk to you…

“It seems to me that the best thing to do is go back and act on your own there. Remember what the Sorcerer said: you are a force. And everyone tries to put a force to use for his own purposes. In the history of our empire there have been numerous instances of bold and forceful individuals who have risen to the throne… of course, they were precisely the ones who created the most cruel traditions of tyranny, but that doesn’t apply to you—you’re not like that, and you are hardly likely to become like that… If I have understood you correctly, it is pointless to hope for a mass movement, which means that your path is not the path of civil war, and in fact not the path of war at all. You should infiltrate and act on your own, as a saboteur. After all, you are right, the system of towers must have a Center. And power over the North lies in the hands of whoever controls that Center. You need to take that lesson to heart.”

“I’m afraid that’s not for me,” Maxim slowly said. “I can’t say why just yet, but it’s not for me, I can sense it. I don’t want to control the Center. But you are right about one thing: there’s nothing for me to do here or in the desert. The desert is too far away, and there is no base here for me to rely on. But there’s still so much for me to find out, there’s still Pandeia and Hontia, there are still the mountains, there’s still the Island Empire somewhere… Have you heard about the white submarines? No? But I have, and so has Gai here, and we know a man who has seen them and fought against them. So that means they can fight…

“Well all right.” Maxim jumped to his feet. “No point in dragging things out. Thank you, Duke-Prince. You’ve been a great help to us. Let’s go, Gai.”

They walked out into the square and stopped beside the half-melted statue. Gai wistfully gazed around. On all sides the yellow ruins trembled in the heat haze, and the air was stifling and foul-smelling, but he no longer wanted to leave this place, this terrible but already familiar place, and go trudging through the forests again, subjecting himself to the will of all the dark, malicious coincidences lying in wait for a man there with every breath he took… He could go back to his own little room, play with bald little Tanga, finally make her the whistle he had promised to make out of a spent cartridge case—and, massaraksh, not begrudge firing a bullet into the air for the sake of the poor little girl…

“Where do you intend to go, after all?” the duke-prince asked, protecting his face from the dust with his battered, faded hat.

“To the west,” Maxim replied. “To the sea. How far is it from here to the sea?”

“Two hundred miles,” the duke-prince pensively said. “And you’ll have to pass through badly polluted areas… Listen,” he added. “Maybe we could do this…” He paused for a long time, and Gai had already begun impatiently stepping from one foot to the other, but Maxim wasn’t in any hurry.

“Agh, what do I really need it for!” the duke-prince exclaimed at last. “To be quite honest, I was keeping it for myself. I thought that when things got really bad, when my nerves gave out, I’d just get in it and go back home, and then they could shoot me if they wanted… But what’s the point now… It’s too late.”

“A plane?” Maxim quickly asked, casting a hopeful glance at the duke-prince.

“Yes. The Mountain Eagle. Does that name mean anything to you? No, of course not… Or to you, young man? No again… It was once an extremely famous bomber, gentlemen. His Imperial Highness Prince Kirnu’s Quadruple-Golden-Bannered Personal Bombing Craft, the Mountain Eagle. I recall that the soldiers were forced to learn that by heart… Private Such and Such, name the personal bombing craft of His Imperial Highness! And the private would name it… Yes… Well then, I’ve preserved it. At first I wanted to evacuate the wounded in it, but there were too many. And then, after all the wounded died… Ah, what’s the point in telling you about that… You take it, my friend. There’s enough fuel to get halfway across the world…”

“Thank you,” said Maxim. “Thank you, Duke-Prince. I’ll never forget you.”

“Never mind me,” the old man said. “I’m not giving it to you for my sake. But if you should manage to do anything, my friend, don’t forget these folks here.”

“I’ll manage something,” said Maxim. “I’ll manage, massaraksh! This has to work out, conscience or no conscience! And I’ll never forget anybody.”

16

Gai had never flown in an airplane before. In fact, this was the first time he had ever seen a plane. He had seen police helicopters and flying tactical platforms plenty of times and once had even been involved in an airborne raid—their section was loaded into a helicopter and landed on a highway, where a crowd of penal brigade soldiers who had rebelled because of the rotten food was surging toward a bridge. Gai’s memories of this aerial assault maneuver were extremely unpleasant: the helicopter had flown very low, shuddering and swaying so badly that his guts were turned completely inside out, and on top of that there was the stupefying roar of the rotor, the stench of gasoline, and fountains of engine oil spraying out from everywhere.

But this was a different matter altogether.

Gai was totally flabbergasted by the Personal Bombing Craft of HIH, the Mountain Eagle. It was a genuine monster of a machine. It was absolutely impossible to imagine that it could rise up into the air: its narrow, ribbed body, decorated with numerous gold emblems, was as long as a street, and its gigantic, menacingly magnificent wings reached out so far, an entire brigade could have taken shelter under them. They were as far from the ground as the roof of a building, but the blades of the six immense propellers reached almost all the way back down. The bomber stood on three wheels, each several times the height of a man. The path to the dizzying height of the glittering glass cabin lay along the slim, silvery thread of a light aluminum ladder. Yes, this was a genuine symbol of the old empire, a symbol of a great past, a symbol of the former might that once extended across the entire continent.

Gai had thrown back his head to look, his legs trembling in awe, and Mak’s words had struck him like a bolt of lightning: “Well, what an old crate, massaraksh!… I beg your pardon, Duke-Prince, that just slipped out.”

“It’s the only one I have,” the duke-prince coolly replied. “And by the way, it happens to be the best bomber in the world. In his time, His Imperial Highness made flights in it to—”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Maxim hastily agreed. “It was just the surprise.”

Up in the cockpit, Gai’s delight reached the extreme limit of ecstasy. The compartment was made completely out of glass. An immense number of unfamiliar instruments, incredibly comfortable soft seats, incomprehensible levers and devices, bunches of different-colored wires, weird-looking helmets lying at the ready… The duke-prince hastily tried to impress something on Mak, pointing at instruments and wiggling levers, and Mak absentmindedly muttered, “Right, yes, I get it, I get it,” but Gai, who had been seated in a chair so that he wouldn’t get in the way, with his rifle on his knees so that he wouldn’t—God forbid!—scratch anything, goggled wide-eyed, inanely turning his head in all directions.

The bomber was standing in an old, sagging hangar at the edge of the forest, and an even, gray-green field without a single hummock stretched out far in front of it. Beyond the field, about three miles away, the forest began again, and hanging over all of this was the white sky, which looked really close, within arm’s reach, from here in the cabin.

Gai was very agitated. He didn’t remember very clearly having taken his leave of the old duke-prince. The duke-prince had said something, and Maxim had said something, he thought they had laughed, and then the duke-prince had shed a few tears, and then the door had slammed… Gai suddenly discovered that he was secured to his seat by broad straps, and Maxim, sitting in the next seat, was rapidly and confidently clicking all sorts of little levers and switches.

Dials lit up on instrument boards, there was a loud crack, a thunderclap of exhaust fumes, the cabin started trembling, everything around him was filled with a ponderous rumbling sound, and far away down below, among the bushes lying flat and the grass that looked as if it were flowing along, the little duke-prince grabbed hold of his hat with both hands and backed away. Gai looked around and saw that the blades of the gigantic propellers had disappeared, they had fused into immense, blurred circles, and suddenly the entire wide-open field jolted and started creeping toward them, faster and faster—there was no more duke-prince, there was no more hangar, there was only the open field, impetuously tearing toward them, and the relentless, appalling shuddering, and the thunderous roaring, and when Gai turned his head with a struggle, he was horrified to discover that the gigantic wings were smoothly swaying up and down, seeming about to fall off at any moment, but then the shuddering disappeared, the field under the wings abruptly dropped away, and Gai was pervaded by a strange, cottony sensation all the way from his head down to his feet. And there was no field under the bomber any longer, and the forest had disappeared, transforming first into a blackish-green brush and then into an immense patched and repatched blanket, and then Gai guessed that he was flying.

He looked at Maxim in total ecstasy. His friend Mak was sitting in a casual pose, with his left arm resting on the armrest and his right hand gently jiggling the largest, and no doubt most important, lever. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were wrinkled up as if he were whistling. Yes, he was a great man. Great and incomprehensible. He can probably do anything at all, Gai thought. Here he is controlling this extremely complex machine that he’s just seen for the first time in his life. It isn’t some kind of tank, or a truck—it’s an airplane, a legendary machine, I didn’t even know any had survived—but he handles it like a toy, as if he’d spent all his life flying through the boundless aerial expanses. It’s simply beyond all comprehension; it seems as if he sees so many things for the first time, but even so, he instantly gets the hang of them and does what has to be done…

And it’s not just machines, is it? Machines aren’t the only ones to acknowledge him as their master… If he wanted, even Cornet Chachu would stroll arm in arm with him… And the Sorcerer, who I’m afraid even to look at, regarded him as an equal… The duke-prince, a colonel and a senior surgeon-in-chief, an aristocrat, you might say, he instantly sensed something special and exalted in Maxim too… He gave him this machine, entrusted it to him… And I wanted to marry Rada to him. What’s Rada to him? He should have some countess, or a princess, say… But he’s friends with me, how about that? And if he told me right now to throw myself out—well, I might very possibly do it, because he’s Maxim! And I’ve learned and seen so many things because of him, more than you could learn and see in an entire lifetime… And I’ll learn and see so many more things because of him, and learn so many things from him…

Maxim sensed Gai’s glance, and his rapture, and his devotion, and he turned his head and gave a broad smile, the way he used to, and Gai barely managed to stop himself from grabbing hold of Maxim’s powerful brown hand and pressing his lips against it in a kiss of gratitude. O my lord, my defense and my leader, command me! Here am I before you, I am ready—hurl me into the fire, unite me with the flames… Against a thousand enemies, against the gaping muzzles, against millions of bullets… Where are they, your enemies? Where are those repulsive little men in abhorrent black uniforms? Where is that spiteful little officer who dared to raise his hand against you? Oh, you black scoundrel, I’ll tear you apart with my nails, I’ll bite your throat out… but not at this moment, no…

My lord is ordering me to do something—he wants something from me. Mak, Mak, I implore you, give me back your smile, why aren’t you smiling anymore? Yes, yes, I am stupid, I don’t understand you, I can’t hear you, the roaring here is so loud, it’s your obedient machine roaring… Ah, that’s what it is, massaraksh, what an idiot I am, why of course, the helmet… Yes, yes, just a moment… I understand. It has an earphone in it, just like in a tank… I am listening, great one! Command me!

No, no, I don’t want to come to my senses! Nothing’s happening to me, it’s just that I am yours, I want to die for you, command me to do something… Yes, I’ll keep quiet, I’ll shut up… It will tear my lungs apart, but I’ll keep quiet, if you command me to…

The tower? What tower? Ah yes, I can see a tower… Those black villains, those villainous Fathers, those infamous dogs, they’ve stuck their towers up everywhere, but we’ll sweep those towers away, we’ll march, uttering fearsome cries, sweeping aside those towers, with our blazing eyes… Guide, guide your obedient machine straight at that abhorrent tower… and give me a bomb and I’ll jump with the bomb, and I won’t miss, you’ll see! Give me a bomb, a bomb! Into the flames! Oh!… Ohhh!… Ohhhh!”

Gai breathed in with a struggle and tore at the collar of his coverall. His ears were ringing; the world was swimming and swaying in front of his eyes. The world was wreathed in mist, but the mist was rapidly dissipating, his muscles were aching, and he had an unpleasant tickling feeling in his throat. Then he saw Maxim’s face, looking dark, gloomy, and even somehow cruel. The memory of something sweet welled up and immediately disappeared, but for some reason he felt a strong desire to stand to attention and click his heels. Only Gai realized that this was inappropriate and Maxim would be angry.

“Did I mess up somehow?” he guiltily asked, anxiously looking around.

“I was the one who messed up,” Maxim replied. “I completely forgot about that crap.”

“About what crap?”

Maxim went back to his chair, put his hand on the lever, and started looking straight ahead. “About the towers,” he eventually said.

“What towers?”

“I set course too far to the north,” said Maxim. “We took a hit from the radiation.”

Gai suddenly felt ashamed. “Did I bellow out the hymn?” he asked.

“Worse than that,” Maxim replied. “Never mind, from now on I’ll be more careful.”

Gai turned away, feeling immensely awkward, agonizingly straining to recall exactly what he had done, and started examining the world down below. He didn’t see any tower, and of course he couldn’t see the hangar or the field they had taken off from any longer. Down below the same patchwork blanket was still creeping by, and he could also see a river—a slim, dull, metallic snake, disappearing into the smoky haze far ahead, where the sea ought to rise up into the sky like a wall… What was I jabbering? Gai wondered. It must have been some kind of deadly nonsense, because Maxim is very annoyed and upset. Massaraksh, maybe my old Guards habits have come back and I insulted Maxim somehow? Where is that damned tower? This is a good opportunity to drop a bomb on it…

The bomber suddenly jolted. Gai bit his tongue, and Maxim grabbed hold of the lever with both hands. Something was wrong, something had happened… Gai apprehensively looked around and was relieved to discover that the wing was still there, and the propellers were still turning. Then he looked up. In the white sky above his head odd-looking, coal-black blotches were slowly expanding. Like drops of ink in water.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Maxim. “A strange business.” He pronounced two unfamiliar words, and then, after a pause, he said, “An attack of sky stones. Nonsense, that just doesn’t happen. The probability’s zero point zero zero… Do I attract them or something?” He pronounced those unfamiliar words again and stopped talking.

Gai was about to ask what sky stones were, but then out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a strange movement down below on the right. He looked more closely. A clump of something yellowish was slowly and ponderously expanding above the dirty-green blanket of the forest. He didn’t immediately realize that it was smoke. Then something glinted deep inside the clump, and a long, black form slid out of it, and at that very moment the horizon heeled over with hideous abruptness, becoming a wall, and Gai grabbed hold of the armrests. The automatic rifle slid off his knees and went tumbling across the floor. “Massaraksh…” Maxim hissed in the earphones. “So that’s what it is! Ah, I’m an idiot!”

The horizon leveled up again, and Gai looked for the yellow clump of smoke, didn’t find it, and started looking straight ahead, and suddenly a fountain of multicolored spray rose up above the forest directly in their course, and yellowish smoke ponderously swelled up in a clump again, and once again a long, black form rose up into the sky and burst into a blinding white sphere—Gai put his hand over his eyes. The white sphere rapidly faded, flooding with black and expanding into a giant blot. The floor started falling away under Gai’s feet, he opened his mouth wide to gasp for air, and for a second he thought his stomach was going to leap out through his throat; the cabin turned dark, ragged black smoke slid toward them and flew off to the sides, then the horizon heeled over again, so that the forest was really close now on the left. Gai squeezed his eyes shut and cringed in anticipation of a blow, pain, or death—there wasn’t enough air, everything around him was shuddering and shaking.

“Massaraksh…” Maxim’s voice hissed in the earphones. “Thirty-three massarakshes…” And then there was an abrupt, furious hammering on the wall beside Gai, like someone firing a machine gun at point-blank range, an intense stream of icy-cold air struck him in the face, his helmet was torn off, and Gai huddled down, hiding his head from the roaring and the crosswind. This is the end, he thought. They’re firing at us, he thought. Now they’ll shoot us down and we’ll burn up, he thought. But nothing happened. The bomber jolted a few more times, tumbled into several pits and rose back up out of them, and then the roaring of the engines suddenly stopped and an appalling silence set in, filled only with the whistling howl of the wind rushing in through the hole.

Gai waited for a little while, then raised his head, trying not to expose his face to the icy blast of air. Maxim was there. He was sitting in a tense pose, holding the control lever with both hands, glancing at the instruments and looking straight ahead by turns. The muscles under his brown skin were distended. The bomber was flying rather strangely somehow—holding its nose up high. The engines weren’t working.

Gai glanced at the wing and was paralyzed with fear. The wing was on fire. “Fire!” he yelled, and tried to jump to his feet. The straps restrained him.

“Sit still,” Maxim said through his teeth, without turning around.

“But the wing’s on fire!”

“What can I do about it? I said it was an old crate, didn’t I? Sit still and stay calm.”

Gai got a grip on himself and started looking ahead. The bomber was flying very low. The alternating black and green patches down below flickered past, dazzling his eyes. And there, already rising up ahead of them, was the glittering, steely surface of the sea. We’ll be smashed to hell, Gai thought with a sinking heart. That damned duke-prince and his damned bomber, massaraksh, a fine fragment of the old empire, we could quite simply have walked there and had an easy time of it, but now we’ll burn up, and if we don’t burn up, we’ll be smashed to pieces, and if we’re not smashed to pieces, we’ll drown… It’s fine for Maxim, he’ll come back to life, but it’s the end for me… I don’t want that to happen.

“Don’t get jumpy,” said Maxim. “Hold on tight… Just a moment…”

The forest below them suddenly came to an end, and Gai saw a wavy, steel-gray surface rushing straight at him and closed his eyes…

A blow. A crunch. A terrifying hissing sound. Another blow. Everything was going to hell, all was lost, this was the end. Gai howled in terror. Some immense force grabbed him and tried to tear him out of the seat, together with the straps, together with all his innards, then flung him back in disappointment, everything all around him was cracking and smashing, there was a stink of burning, and lukewarm water was spraying about. Then everything went quiet. In the silence Gai could hear splashing and gurgling, something was hissing and crackling, and the floor began slowly swaying to and fro. Apparently he could open his eyes now and see what it was like in the next world…

Gai opened his eyes and saw Maxim, who was hanging down over him, unfastening his straps. “Can you swim?”

Aha, so we’re alive then. “Yes,” Gai answered.

“Then let’s go.”

Gai cautiously got up, expecting to feel sharp pain in his battered and broken body, but his body turned out to be all right. The bomber was gently swaying on low waves. Its left wing was missing, but the right one was still dangling on a latticework metal strut. The shoreline was right in front of its nose—the bomber had obviously been swung around when it landed.

Maxim picked up the automatic rifle, slung it behind his back, and opened the door. Water immediately rushed into the cabin, there was a repulsive smell of gasoline, and the floor under their feet started slowly heeling over.

“Forward,” Maxim commanded. Gai squeezed past him and obediently plunked down into the waves.

He sank in over his head and surfaced, spitting out water, then swam for the shore. The shore was close, a firm shore that you could walk on, and even fall on without any danger to your life. Maxim swam beside him, silently slicing through the water. Massaraksh, he even swims like a fish, as if he was born in the water… Gai puffed and panted, working away as hard as he could with his arms and legs. It was tough swimming in his coverall and boots, and he was delighted when his foot touched the sandy bottom. The shoreline was still quite a long way off, but he got up and walked, raking his arms through the dirty, oil-slicked water in front of him. Maxim carried on swimming, overtook Gai, and emerged first onto the shallow slope of the sandy shore. When Gai staggered up to him, he was standing with his legs wide apart, looking up at the sky. Gai looked up at the sky too. Numerous black blots were spreading across it.

“We were lucky,” said Maxim. “About ten of them were launched.”

“Ten what?” asked Gai, slapping himself on the ear to shake out the water.

“Missiles… I completely forgot about them… They’d been waiting twenty years for us to fly past, and then we did… Why the hell didn’t I suspect?”

Gai thought in annoyance that he could have suspected too, but he didn’t. And two hours ago he could have said, How can we fly, Mak, when the forest is full of missile silos? Yes, thank you, of course, Duke-Prince, but it would have been better if you’d flown in your bomber yourself… He looked around at the sea. The Mountain Eagle was almost completely submerged, with the multiple airfoils of its broken tailplane pitifully protruding from the water.

“Right then,” said Gai. “As I understand things, we’re not going to reach the Island Empire now. So what are we going to do?”

“First of all,” Maxim replied, “we’ll take our medication. Get it out.”

“What for?” asked Gai. He didn’t like the prince’s tablets.

“The water’s very dirty,” said Maxim. “My skin’s stinging all over. Let’s take four tablets each, or even five.”

Gai hastily took out one of the bottles and shook out ten little yellow spheres onto his palm, and they shared the pills between them.

“And now let’s go,” said Maxim. “Take your rifle.”

Gai took his rifle, spat out the acrid, bitter taste that had built up in his mouth, and set off along the shoreline after Maxim, with his feet sinking into the sand. It was hot and his coverall quickly dried out, but there was still water squelching in his boots. Maxim walked quickly and confidently, as if he knew exactly where they needed to go, although all around them there was nothing to be seen, apart from the sea on the left, the broad beach ahead and on the right, and, even farther away on the right, the high dunes about half a mile away from the water, with the tattered crowns of forest trees appearing above them from time to time.

They walked for about two miles, and all the time Gai kept wondering where they were going and where they were in general. He didn’t want to ask, he wanted to figure it out for himself, but after recalling all the circumstances, he could only figure out that the estuary of the Blue Serpent River must be somewhere ahead, and they were walking north—but he couldn’t understand where to and what for… He soon got fed up of trying to figure things out. Holding his rifle close, he caught up with Mak and asked what their plans were now.

Maxim quite readily replied that he and Gai didn’t have any definite plans now, and they could only trust to chance. They could only hope that a white submarine would approach the shoreline and they would reach it before the Guards did. However, since waiting for that to happen while surrounded by dry sand was a dubious sort of pleasure, they had to try to walk to the Resort, which ought to be somewhere not far away. The city itself had been destroyed a long time ago, of course, but the springs must have survived, and in any case they would have a roof over their heads. They could spend the night in the city and then see what was what. Maybe they would have to spend twenty or thirty days on the seashore.

Gai discreetly remarked that this plan seemed rather strange to him, and Mak immediately agreed with that, and asked in a hopeful voice if Gai happened to have some other, cleverer plan in reserve. Gai said that unfortunately he didn’t have any other plan, but they shouldn’t forget about the Guard’s tank patrols, which, as far as he knew, came a very long way to the south along the shoreline. Maxim frowned and said that was bad, and they would have to keep a sharp ear out and not let themselves be taken by surprise, after which he intensively interrogated Gai for a while about the tactics of the patrols. Having learned that the tank patrols focused on the sea rather than the shore, and that it was easy to hide from them by lying in the dunes, he calmed down and started whistling an unfamiliar march.

They tramped another mile or so to the strains of that march, and all the while Gai kept wondering how they ought to behave if a patrol did spot them after all, and after he thought of the answer, he expounded his ideas to Maxim. “If they discover us,” he said, “we’ll lie and say the degenerates kidnapped me and you pursued them and freed me, and the two of us have been wandering around in the forest, and today we reached this place.”

“But what will that do for us?” Maxim asked, without any particular enthusiasm.

“What it will do for us,” said Gai, starting to get angry, “is at least stop them from whacking us on the spot.”

“Oh, no,” Maxim firmly replied, “I’m not letting anyone whack me again, or you either.”

“But what if it’s a tank?” Gai asked in admiration.

“A tank—so what?” said Maxim. “A tank’s no big deal…” He paused for a while and said, “You know, it would be good if we captured a tank.” Gai could see that this idea was very much to his liking. “That’s an excellent idea of yours, Gai,” said Maxim. “And that’s what we’ll do. Capture a tank. As soon as they show up, you immediately fire a burst into the air from your rifle, and I’ll put my hands behind my back, and you escort me straight toward them. And what happens after that is my concern, but you be careful to keep well out of it, don’t get in the way of my hand, and especially don’t do any more shooting.”

Gai got all fired up at the idea and suggested walking along the dunes so that they could see the tanks from a distance. So that was what they did, climbed up onto the dunes. And immediately they spotted a white submarine.

Behind the dunes they saw a small, shallow bay, and the submarine was jutting up out of the water about a hundred yards from the shore. It actually didn’t look anything like a submarine, especially not a white one. Gai thought at first that it was either the carcass of some gigantic two-humped animal or a freakishly shaped rock that had mysteriously risen up out of the sand. But Maxim immediately realized what it was. He even surmised that the submarine was abandoned, that it had been standing here for several years and had been sucked into the sand. And that was exactly the way it was. When they reached the bay and walked down to the water, Gai saw that the long hull and the two superstructures were covered with rusty blotches, the white paint had peeled away, the artillery platform was twisted sideways, and the gun was staring down into the water. There were gaping black holes with scorched edges in the metal plating—nothing could have remained alive inside it, of course.

“Is this definitely a white submarine?” Maxim asked. “Have you seen them before?

“Yes, I think so,” Gai replied. “I’ve never served on the coast, but they showed us photographs and mentograms… they described them… There was even an educational film, Tanks in Coastal Defense. This is a submarine. It obviously must have been carried into the bay by a storm, got stranded on a shoal, and then a patrol showed up… Do you see how battered it is? That plating’s like a sieve…”

“Yes, it looks like that,” Maxim murmured, peering at the vessel. “Shall we go and take a look?”

Gai hesitated. “Well, of course, we could,” he hesitantly said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, how can I put it…”

Yes indeed, how could he put it? Corporal Serembesh, a brave tank soldier, had once told Gai, in a dark barracks after lights-out, that it wasn’t ordinary sailors who sailed in white submarines—dead sailors sailed in them, serving their second term, and some of them were cowards who had died in a state of fear, and they were serving out their first term… The sea demons groped about on the bottom of the sea, caught the drowned men, and filled the crews with them… Gai couldn’t tell Mak something like that—Mak would laugh at him, and Gai didn’t think this was a laughing matter…

Or take, for instance, acting private Leptu, demoted from officer’s rank. When he got drunk in the canteen, he often used to say, “That’s all just nonsense, guys—all those degenerates and mutants of yours, and the radiation, you can deal with all that, you can survive it—but you just pray that God never lands you on a white submarine. Better to drown outright, guys, than even touch the thing, I ought to know…” Nobody knew anything about why Leptu had been demoted, but previously he had served on the coast and commanded a patrol boat…

“You know,” Gai fervidly said, “there are all sorts of superstitions, all sorts of legends… I won’t tell you about them, but Cornet Chachu, for instance, said that all the submarines were infected and it was forbidden to board them… they say there’s even an official order about that, about crippled submarines…”

“OK,” said Maxim. “You stay here, and I’ll go. Let’s see what kind of contagion there is in there.”

Gai didn’t have time to say a word—before he could even open his mouth, Maxim had already jumped into the water. He dived and didn’t reappear for long time—Gai even started gasping in anxiety as he waited for him—and then Maxim’s black-haired head appeared alongside the flaking hull, directly below a shell hole. Nimbly and effortlessly, like a fly climbing up a wall, the brown figure scrambled up the slanting deck, flew up onto the bow superstructure, and disappeared. Gai convulsively sighed and loitered on the spot for a while before he started strolling back and forth along the water’s edge, keeping his eyes fixed on the dead, rusty monster.

It was quiet; in this dead bay even the waves weren’t murmuring. A blank white sky, lifeless white dunes, everything dry, hot, and absolutely still. Gai cast a look full of hate at the rusty carcass, unable to believe his sheer bad luck: other guys served for years and never saw any submarines, but he and Mak had just tumbled down out of the sky, strode along for an hour or so, and there it was: Welcome… How did I ever decide to do such a thing? It’s all Mak’s fault. When he says something, it all sounds so fine, as if there’s nothing even to think about, and nothing to be afraid of… Or maybe I wasn’t afraid because I imagined a white submarine as something alive and white, neat and trim, with sailors on the deck, dressed all in white… But this is an iron corpse… and this place is so dead, there isn’t even any wind…

But there was a wind, I definitely remember: as we were walking along, the wind was blowing in my face, a refreshing little breeze… Gai longingly looked around, then sat down on the sand, laid his rifle beside him, and started indecisively tugging off his right boot. Can you believe this silence! And what if he doesn’t come back at all? What if this lousy iron bastard has swallowed him up without leaving a single trace?… Oh, damn it, damn it, damn it!

He shuddered and dropped his boot; a terrifying, long, drawn-out sound had rung out across the bay, something between a howl and a screech, as if devils had scraped a rusty knife across a sinful soul. Oh Lord, it was just an iron hatch opening, a hatch that had rusted closed… Damn it, I’ve broken into a sweat! He opened a hatch, so now he’ll climb out… No, he isn’t climbing out.

For several minutes Gai craned his neck, looking at the submarine and listening. Silence. The same terrible silence, even more terrible after that rusty howl… Or maybe he… maybe the hatch didn’t open but close? It closed itself… A vision arose before Gai’s blank, lifeless eyes: a heavy steel door closing itself behind Maxim, and the heavy bolt sliding shut on its own… Gai licked his dry lips, gulped with a dry throat, and shouted, “Hey, Mak!” But it wasn’t a shout… merely a hiss, that was all… Oh Lord, if I could just make some kind of sound! “Heeey,” he howled in desperation. “Heeey…” the dunes somberly replied, and everything went quiet again.

Silence. And he didn’t have the strength to shout again…

Keeping his eyes fixed on the submarine, Gai groped for his rifle, released the safety catch with a trembling finger, and fired a burst into the bay without aiming at anything. There was just a brief, powerless crackling sound, as if he had fired into cotton. Little fountains spurted up on the smooth surface and circles started spreading out. Gai raised the barrel higher and pressed the trigger again. This time the sound was right: the rattle of bullets on metal, the whine of ricochets, the sharp smack of the echo. And then nothing. Not a single thing. Not another sound, as if he were here all alone, as if he had always been alone. As if he had ended up here in some mysterious way, been transported here, into this dead place, in a delirious dream, unable to wake up or shake off his trance. And now he would have to stay here alone forever.

Absolutely frantic, just as he was, in one boot, Gai waded into the water. Slowly at first, raising his feet high, until he was up to his waist in water, then faster and faster, almost starting to run, sobbing and swearing out loud. The rusty hulk came closer. Alternately plodding along, stroking his arms through the water, and flinging himself forward to swim, Gai reached the side of the vessel and tried to scramble up, but he couldn’t. He circled around the stern of the submarine, grabbed hold of some cables or other, and scrambled up, skinning his hands and knees, onto the deck, where he stopped, weeping floods of tears. It was absolutely clear to him that Maxim was dead. “Heeey,” he shouted in a strangled voice. Silence.

The deck was empty; dried-out seaweed was stuck all over the perforated iron, as if it were overgrown with matted hair. The bow superstructure hung over his head like an immense spotted mushroom, and a wide, jagged scar gaped open in the armor plating to one side of him. With his boot clattering on the iron deck, Gai circled around the superstructure and saw iron rungs leading upward, still damp. Slinging his rifle behind his back, he started climbing. He climbed for a long time, for an eternity, in stifling silence, toward inevitable death, toward eternal death. He scrambled up and then froze there, on all fours.

The monster was already waiting for him. The hatch cover was wide open, as if it hadn’t been closed for a hundred years and even the hinges had rusted in place again: Do please come in! Gai crawled to the black, gaping gullet, glanced in, and his head started spinning and he felt nauseous… Silence was welling up out of that iron throat in a compact mass, years and years of stagnant, musty silence, and Gai suddenly imagined his good friend Mak down there in the yellow, putrefied light, crushed under those tons of silence, fighting for his life, alone against them all, fighting with his final ounces of strength and calling out, “Gai! Gai!”—but the grinning silence languidly swallowed up those words, leaving not a trace behind, and kept bearing down on Mak, pinning him down, crushing him. It was absolutely unbearable, and Gai climbed into the hatchway.

Weeping, he tried to hurry, and finally he fell and went clattering downward, falling several yards before he landed on sand. He was in an iron corridor, feebly lit by widely spaced, dusty little lightbulbs; over years and years, fine sand had drifted in and built up at the bottom of the shaft. Gai jumped to his feet—he was still hurrying, still terribly afraid of being too late—and he ran without thinking about where he was going, shouting, “I’m here, Mak… I’m coming… I’m coming…”

“Why are you shouting like that?” Mak asked in a grouchy voice, seeming to thrust his head straight out of the wall. “What’s happened? Have you cut your finger?”

Gai halted and dropped his arms. He was on the verge of fainting and had to lean against a bulkhead. His heart was furiously pounding, the blows thundered in his ears like a drum tattoo, and he couldn’t control his voice.

Maxim looked at him in amazement for a moment, then he must have understood: he squeezed through into the corridor—the bulkhead door screeched again with a piercing note—walked up to Gai, took him by the shoulders, shook him, pulled him close, and hugged him, and for a few seconds Gai lay there on his chest in blissful oblivion, gradually recovering his wits. “I thought… you’d been… that you’d…”

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Maxim said in a soothing voice. “It’s my fault, I should have called you at once. But there are some strange things in here, you know…”

Gai pulled away, wiped his nose with his wet sleeve, then wiped his face with his wet hand, and only then started feeling ashamed. “You were gone for ages and ages!” he furiously exclaimed. “I called, I fired my gun… Is it really so hard to answer?”

“Massaraksh, I didn’t hear anything,” Maxim guiltily said. “You know, there’s a magnificent radio in here… I didn’t know they could make such powerful ones in these parts.”

“A radio, a radio…” Gai muttered, squeezing in through the half-open door. “You’re amusing yourself in here, and meanwhile someone’s almost gone insane worrying about you… What is all this?”

It was a rather spacious room with a rotted carpet on the floor and three semicircular lamps on the ceiling, only one of which was lit. A round table stood at the center of the space, with chairs around it. Strange-looking framed photographs and pictures were hanging on the walls, from which the tattered remains of velvet upholstery dangled. A large radio was crackling and howling in the corner—Gai had never seen one like it before.

“This is something like a mess room,” said Maxim. “Walk around and take a look, there’s plenty to look at in here.”

“What about the crew?” asked Gai.

“There’s nobody here. Neither alive nor dead. The lower compartments are flooded. I think they’re all in there.”

Gai looked at him in amazement, but Maxim turned away with a preoccupied expression on his face. “I have to tell you,” he said, “it looks like it’s a good thing that we didn’t reach the Empire in that plane. Just take a look, take a look…” He sat down at the radio and started twisting the tuning knobs.

Gai looked around, not knowing where to begin, then walked over to the wall and started examining the photographs hanging there. For a while he couldn’t understand what they were photographs of, then he realized that they were X-rays. Looking out at him were nebulous skulls, all of them with identical grins. Every image had an indecipherable inscription, as if someone had signed them. Members of the crew? Celebrities of some kind or other? Gai shrugged. Maybe Uncle Kaan could make some kind of sense of this, but we’re just simple folk…

In the farthest corner he saw a large, bright poster, a poster in three colors that was quite beautiful, even though it had been attacked by mold… The poster showed a blue sea and a handsome orange man in an unfamiliar uniform emerging from the sea, with one foot already poised on the black shoreline; he was very muscular, with a disproportionately small head, half of which consisted of his powerful neck. In one hand the mighty hero was clutching a scroll with an incomprehensible inscription, and with the other he was thrusting a blazing torch into the land. The torch was setting fire to a city, and repulsive-looking freaks were writhing in the flames, while dozens of other freaks were fleeing on their hands and knees in various directions. Something was written in large, orange letters in the upper part of the poster; the letters were familiar, the same ones that Gai was used to, but the words they made up were absolutely unpronounceable.

The longer Gai looked at the poster, the less he liked it. For some reason he remembered a poster in their barracks that showed a bold guardsman like a black eagle (also with a very small head and powerful muscles) bravely shearing off the head of a repulsive orange snake that had thrust itself up out of the sea with a gigantic pair of scissors. He recalled that there were words inscribed on the blades of the scissors: on one it said BATTLE GUARDS, and on the other OUR GLORIOUS ARMY. “Aha,” Gai said to himself, casting a final glance at the poster. “We’ll see about that… We’ll see who singes who, massaraksh!”

He turned away from the poster and stopped dead.

Staring at him with glass eyes from an elegant varnished shelf was a familiar face—square, with light-brown bangs above the eyebrows and a conspicuous scar on the right cheek… Cornet Pudurash, a national hero, the commander of a company in the Dead but Unforgotten Brigade, the destroyer of eleven white submarines, who had perished while waging battle against overwhelming odds. His portrait, surmounted by a bouquet of immortelle flowers, hung in every barracks, his bust adorned every parade ground… but for some reason his shriveled head, with dead, yellow skin, was here. Gai stepped back. Yes, it was an absolutely genuine head. And there was another head—an unfamiliar, sharp-featured face… And another head… and another…

“Mak!” said Gai. “Have you seen this?”

“Yes,” said Maxim.

“These are heads!” said Gai, “Genuine heads…”

“Look at the photo albums on the table,” said Maxim.

Gai tore his eyes away from the appalling collection with an effort, turned around, and haltingly walked over to the table. The radio was shouting something in an unfamiliar language; music rang out, chimes jangled, and then somebody started speaking again—in a velvety, insinuating voice…

Gai picked up one of the albums at random and opened the hard, leather-bound cover. A portrait. A strange, long face with bushy sideburns that drooped from the cheeks right down to the shoulders, with hair shaved above the forehead, a hooked nose, and unusually shaped eyes. An unfamiliar uniform, with badges or medals of some kind arranged in two rows… What a weird character… Probably some kind of big shot. Gai turned the page. The same individual in a group of other individuals on the bridge of a white submarine, as dour as ever, although the others were grinning, displaying their teeth. In the background, out of focus—something like an esplanade, some unfamiliar-looking structures, vague silhouettes of either palm trees or cacti…

The next page took Gai’s breath away: a burning Dragon with its turret twisted over to the side, the body of a Guards tank crewman hanging out of the hatch, another two bodies lying one on top of the other to one side, and the same character standing over them with his legs straddled—holding a pistol in his lowered hand and wearing a cap that looked like a pointed hood. The smoke from the Dragon was thick and black, but the area was familiar—it was this very shore, this sandy beach with the dunes behind it…

Gai completely tensed up as he turned over the page, and his expectations were met. A crowd of mutants, about twenty people, all naked, a whole heap of freaks, tied together with a single rope. Several brisk-looking pirates in pointed hoods, holding smoking torches, and that character again at one side, obviously giving an order, with his right hand extended and his left resting on the handle of a cutlass. How repulsive those freaks were, it was horrifying just to look at them… But what came next was even more horrifying.

The same heap of mutants, but already burned. The same character standing a short distance away, with his back to the corpses, sniffing a flower and chatting with another character…

A huge tree in the forest, hung all over with bodies. Some suspended by the hands, some by the feet—and these weren’t freaks; one was wearing the check coverall of an educatee, another was in the black jacket of a guardsman.

A burning street, a woman with a baby lying in the road…

An old man tied to a post. His face was contorted, he was shouting, his eyes were squeezed shut. And the same character was right there, checking a medical syringe with a preoccupied air.

And then more hanged, burning, burned mutants, convicts, guardsmen, fishermen, peasants, men, women, old people, little children… an entire beach full of little children and the same character squatting down behind a heavy machine gun… women being dragged along… the same character again with a syringe, the lower half of his face covered by a white mask… a heap of severed heads, and the same character rummaging in this heap with a cane—in this image he was smiling… a panoramic shot: the line of the beach with four tanks on the dunes, all burning, and in the foreground two small figures in black with their hands raised…

Enough. Gai slammed the album shut and tossed it away, sat there for a few seconds, and then flung all the albums onto the floor with a curse.

“And you want to reach an agreement with them?” he yelled at Maxim’s back. “You want to bring them here, to us? That butcher?” He jumped up, rushed over to the albums, and lashed out at them with his foot.

Maxim turned off the radio. “Don’t get into a rage,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with them anymore. And don’t yell at me, you people are the ones to blame, you just let your world be destroyed, massaraksh, you devastated everything, plundered everything, sank to the level of vile, depraved animals. Now what can I do with you?” Suddenly he was there, close beside Gai, and he grabbed him by the sides of his chest. “Now what am I supposed to do with all of you?” he barked. “What? What? You mean you don’t know? Come on, tell me!”

Gai shifted his neck about without speaking, feebly trying to push Maxim off.

Maxim let him go. “I know myself,” he said morosely, “that I can’t bring anyone here. We’re surrounded by ravening beasts… We should be sending out armies against them…” He grabbed one of the albums off the floor and started jerkily turning the pages. “What a world you’ve fouled up,” he said. “What a world! Here, look, what a world!”

Gai looked over his arm. In this album there were no horrors, only landscapes from various places, astoundingly beautiful and clear color photographs: blue bays framed in luxuriant greenery, blindingly white cities above the sea, a waterfall in a mountain gorge, a magnificent highway with a stream of different-colored automobiles on it. And ancient fortresses, and snowy mountain peaks above the clouds, and someone merrily hurtling down a snowy mountain slope on skis, and laughing girls playing in the sea surf.

“Where is all of this now?” Maxim asked. “What have you done with all of this, you damned children of those damned Fathers? Smashed it, befouled it, betrayed and exchanged it for iron… Ah, you… little people…”

He flung the album onto the table. “Let’s go.” He furiously fell against the door, it flew open with a screech and a squeal, and he strode off along the corridor.

On the deck he asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Uh-huh,” Gai replied.

“OK,” said Maxim. “We’ll eat right away. Let’s swim for it.”

Gai clambered out onto the shore first, immediately took off his boot, got undressed, and laid out his clothes to dry. Maxim was still swimming around, and Gai felt alarmed as he watched him. His friend Mak was diving very deep and staying underwater for a really long time. He shouldn’t do that, it was dangerous—how could he have enough air? Eventually Maxim came out, dragging a huge, powerful fish by the gills. The fish looked dazed, as if it just couldn’t understand how it had been caught with bare hands.

Maxim tossed it away from himself into the sand and said, “I think that will do. It’s hardly radioactive at all. Probably a mutant as well. Take your tablets, and I’ll prepare it. We can eat it raw, I’ll teach you how it’s done—it’s called sashimi. Never tried it? Come on, give me a knife…”

When they had eaten their fill of sashimi—Gai had to admit it had turned out pretty tasty—they stretched out naked on the hot sand, and after a long pause Maxim asked, “If we got picked up by the patrols and surrendered, where would they send us?”

“Where? They’d send you to your place of reeducation and me to my place of service… Why?”

“Is that certain?”

“It couldn’t be more certain… The instructions of the commandant-general himself. But why do you ask?”

“Now we’ll go and look for the Guards,” said Maxim.

“To capture a tank?”

“No, we’ll use your cover story. You were kidnapped by degenerates, and an educatee rescued you.”

“Surrender?” Gai sat up. “But how can we? Me too? Go back into the radiation field?”

Maxim didn’t say anything.

“I’ll turn into a blockheaded dummy again…” Gai said in a helpless voice.

“No,” said Maxim. “That is, yes, of course… but it won’t be the same as it was before… Of course, you will be bit of a blockhead. But now you’ll believe in something else, won’t you? In something that’s right… Of course, that’s still not really very good… but it’s still better, a lot better.”

“But what for?” Gai shouted in despair. “What do you need to do it for?”

Maxim ran his hand over his face. “You see, Gai, my old friend,” he said. “A war has broken out. Either we’ve attacked the Hontians, or they’ve attacked us… Anyway, in short, a war.”

Gai looked at him in horror. A war means nuclear war—there isn’t any other kind now… Rada… Oh Lord, why does this have to happen? Everything all over again from the beginning: the hunger, the grief, the refugees…

“We have to be there,” Maxim went on. “General mobilization has already been declared, everyone’s being called up, even the educatees are being amnestied and enlisted into the ranks… And we have to be together, Gai. You’re a penal unit officer, after all… It would be good if I could end up under your command…”

Gai was hardly even listening to him. He swayed on his feet, clutching at his hair and repeating to himself, “What for, what for, damn you and curse you! Curse you, curse you thirty-three times over!”

Maxim shook him by the shoulder. “Come on, get a grip on yourself!” he said in a harsh voice. “Don’t start falling to pieces. We’ll have to fight now, there’s no time for falling to pieces…” He got up and rubbed his face again. “Of course, with those cursed towers of yours… But a war means nuclear war! Massaraksh, no towers will be any help to them now…”

“Get a Move On, Fank, Get a Move On!”

“Get a move on, Fank, get a move on. I’m late.”

“Yes, sir. Rada Gaal… She has been removed from the custody of the state prosecutor and is now in our hands.”

“Where?”

“In your mansion the Crystal Swan. I regard it as my duty to express once again my doubts concerning the rationality of this action. A woman like that is hardly going to be of any help to us in controlling Mak. Her kind are easily forgotten, and Mak—”

“Do you think Egghead is stupider than you?”

“No, but—”

“Does Egghead know who kidnapped the woman?”

“I’m afraid that he does.”

“All right, so he knows… That’s all about that matter. Next?”

“Sandy Chichaku has met with Twitcher. Twitcher has apparently agreed to get him together with Brother-in-Law.”

“Stop. Which Chichaku? Highbrow Chik?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not interested in underground matters right now. Is that all you have on Mak’s case? Then listen. This damn war has screwed up all our plans. I’m going away and I’ll be back in thirty or forty days. In that time, Fank, you have to wrap up Mak’s case. By the time I get back Mak must be here, in this building. Give him a job, let him work, don’t restrict his freedom, but make it clear to him—very, very gently!—that Rada’s fate depends on how he behaves… Under no circumstances allow them to meet… Show him the institute, tell him what we’re working on… within reasonable limits, of course. Tell him about me, describe me as an intelligent, benign, just individual, a major scientist. Give him my articles… apart from the top secret ones. Hint at my being in opposition to the government. He mustn’t feel even the slightest desire to leave the institute. That’s all I have to say. Any questions?”

“Yes. Security, guards?”

“None. It’s pointless.”

“Surveillance?”

“Very cautious… But better not. Don’t frighten him off. The vital thing is that he mustn’t want to leave the institute… Massaraksh, and I have to go away at a time like this! Well, is that everything now?”

“One final question. I’m sorry, Wanderer.”

“Yes?”

“Just who is he, after all? What do you need him for?”

Wanderer got up, walked over to the window and, without looking around, said, “I’m afraid of him, Fank. He’s a very, very, very dangerous man.”

17

A hundred miles from the Hontian border, when the troop train was stuck for a long time on a siding at a dingy, scruffy station, newly appointed Private Second Class Zef, having come to an amicable arrangement with a security guard, ran to the station’s water heater to get some boiling water and returned with a portable radio. He told everyone that there was absolute bedlam at the station: two brigades were entraining at the same time, and the two generals had started squabbling and swearing at each other and became careless, so he had mingled with the crowd of orderlies, valets, and adjutants surrounding the generals and borrowed this radio from one of them.

The heated freight car greeted this announcement with an outburst of loud, zesty, patriotic guffaws. All forty men immediately crowded around Zef, but they took a long time to get settled—someone got smacked in the teeth to stop him from shoving, someone else got poked with an awl in a soft spot, and they all cursed and complained about each other, until Maxim finally barked, “Quiet, you scumbags!” Then they all settled down. Zef switched on the radio and started tuning in to all the stations, one after another.

Certain curious things immediately came to light. First, it turned out that the war hadn’t started yet, and the Voice of the Fathers radio station, which for the last week had been howling about bloody battles on their own territory, had been lying in a most blatant fashion. There hadn’t been any bloody battles yet. The Hontian Patriotic League was clamoring in horror for the whole wide world to hear that these bandits, these usurpers of power, these so-called Unknown Fathers had capitalized on the acts of heinous provocation by their own hirelings in the form of the notorious so-called Hontian Union of Justice and were now concentrating their armor-clad hordes on the borders of poor, persecuted Hontia. In turn, the Hontian Union of Justice castigated the Hontian Patriots, those paid agents of the Unknown Fathers, in the most emphatic terms possible and recounted in exhaustive detail how someone’s vastly superior forces had forced someone else’s units, exhausted by preceding battles, across the border and were preventing them from returning, and this circumstance had provided the so-called Unknown Fathers with a pretext for a barbarous invasion, which could be expected at any moment. And in addition, both the League and the Union declared in almost identical terms that it was their sacred duty to warn the brazen aggressor that the counterblow would be devastating, and they hinted in vague terms at the use of atomic traps of some kind.

Pandeian radio summed up the situation in very calm tones and announced without the slightest embarrassment that any way in which this conflict developed would suit Pandeia. The private radio stations in Hontia and Pandeia amused their listeners with jolly music and ribald trivia games, while both of the Unknown Fathers’ government radio stations continuously broadcast coverage of hate rallies, interspersed with martial music. Zef also picked up some broadcasts in languages that only he knew, and informed everyone that the principality of Ondol apparently still existed and was still carrying out piratical raids on the island of Hassalg. (Apart from Zef, not a single man in the railcar had ever heard of this principality or this island.) For the most part, however, the airwaves were choked with mind-boggling invective exchanged between commanders of the military units and formations straining hard to squeeze their way through to the Steel Staging Area along the slim threads of two rickety railroad lines.

“We’re not ready for war this time either, massaraksh,” Zef remarked, switching off the radio and opening the debate.

The others didn’t agree with him. In the opinion of the majority, the immense force that was now lumbering on its way spelled the end for the Hontians. The criminal convicts thought the most important thing was to get across the border, and then every man would be his own master and every occupied city would be handed over to them for three days. The political convicts—that is, the degenerates—took a gloomier view of the situation and didn’t expect the future to bring anything good; they openly declared that they were all being sent to the slaughter, to set off the atomic mines, that none of them would be left alive, so it would be a good idea to get as far as the border and go to ground there, somewhere where they wouldn’t be found. The contesting viewpoints were so diametrically opposed that a genuine discussion failed to develop, and the patriotic debate very rapidly degenerated into monotonous abuse and revilement of the lousy, stinking creeps in the rear, who hadn’t given the men any chow yesterday or today and had probably already stolen all the vodka that was due to the men. The military convicts were prepared to carry on talking about this subject right through the night, so Maxim and Zef elbowed their way out of the crowd and clambered up onto the crooked bunks that had been crudely cobbled together out of unplaned planks.

Zef was hungry and angry. He settled down to fall asleep, but Maxim didn’t let him. “You’ll sleep later,” he sternly admonished him. “Tomorrow, maybe, we’ll be at the front, and we haven’t properly agreed about anything yet…” Zef grumbled that there was nothing to agree about, that they could sleep on it, that Maxim wasn’t blind and he must be able to see for himself what deep shit they were in, that there was no way you could get any decent kind of operation together with this petty trash, with these thieves and bookkeepers. Maxim objected that they weren’t talking about any kind of operation yet. It still wasn’t clear what this war was needed for, and who needed it, and would Zef please be polite enough not to sleep when he was being spoken to, and to share his own considerations on the subject. Zef, however, had no intention of being polite, and he didn’t conceal the fact. Why the hell, massaraksh, should he be polite, when he was so hungry and he was dealing with a snot-nosed kid who was incapable of drawing elementary conclusions and still insisted on trying to interfere in the revolution… He snarled, yawned, scratched, rewound his footcloths, and swore at Maxim, but after being goaded, exhorted, and lashed, he finally started talking and expounded his ideas concerning the causes of the war.

In his opinion, there were at least three possible causes of the war. Maybe they were all operating together, or maybe one of them was predominant. Or maybe there was a fourth cause that had not yet occurred to Zef. First of all, the economy. Information about the economic situation in the Land of the Fathers was kept strictly secret, but everybody knew that the situation was shitty, massaraksh and massaraksh, and when the economy is in a shitty condition, the best thing to do is to start a war with someone in order to immediately stop everybody’s mouths. Wild Boar, who was an old hand and quite a specialist on the influence of economics on politics, had already forecast this war five years ago. Towers were all very well, but poverty was still poverty. You couldn’t carry on for very long instilling into a hungry man’s mind the idea that he’s full—his mind couldn’t take the strain, and there wasn’t much fun in ruling a nation of madmen, especially since the insane were not susceptible to the radiation…

Another possible cause was ideological. State ideology in the Land of the Fathers was based on the idea of an external threat. At first this had simply been a lie, invented in order to impose discipline on the lawless anarchy of the postwar period, but then the individuals who had invented this lie had quit the stage, and their successors believed it and genuinely thought that Hontia was simply itching to get its hands on our wealth. And if you bore in mind that Hontia was a former province of the old empire that had declared independence in difficult times, then that added colonial ideas into the mix: bring the bastards back into the fold, after punishing them in exemplary fashion first…

And finally, the cause could be a matter of internal politics. The Department of Public Health and the military had been at each others’ throats for many years now. It was a question of which one would gobble up the other. The Department of Public Health was a hideously ravenous, insatiable organization, but if these military operations were even marginally successful, the generals would bring this organization to heel. Of course, if the war failed to produce a result that was even slightly worthwhile, it would be the gentlemen generals who were brought to heel, and therefore the possibility could not be excluded that this entire undertaking was a cunning act of provocation by the Department of Public Health. And by the way, it looked as if this was actually the case—judging from the disarray that was apparent everywhere, and also from what we had been yelling out loud to the entire world for a week already, when it turned out that the military action had actually not even started yet. And maybe, massaraksh, it wouldn’t start at all…

When Zef reached this point, the couplers clattered and clanged and the car shuddered. They heard shouts, whistles, and tramping feet outside, and the train carrying the penal tank brigade set off. The criminal convicts broke into thunderous song: “Once again there’s no chow and no vodka for us…”

“OK,” said Maxim. “What you say sounds perfectly plausible. But then how do you see the war developing, if it does start after all? What will happen then?”

Zef aggressively growled that he was no general, and then plunged straight into telling Maxim how he saw the whole business. Apparently, during the brief respite between the end of the world war and the beginning of their civil war, the Hontians had managed to fence themselves off from their former overlords with a strong cordon of atomic minefields. And in addition, the Hontians undoubtedly also possessed atomic artillery, and their politicians had had enough wits not to make use of all this abundant wealth in the civil war but to save it for us. Which meant that the invasion could be envisaged as proceeding approximately as follows: The spearhead would be three or four penal tank brigades lined up in the Steel Staging Area, with an army corps propping them up from the rear. Following up behind the army men, they would send in blocking detachments of guardsmen in heavy tanks, equipped with mobile radiation emitters. The degenerates, like Zef, would all go rushing forward to escape from the radiation blasts, the criminals and army men would go rushing forward in a fit of induced elation and enthusiasm, and any deviations from this norm, which were bound to arise, would be obliterated by fire from the Guards bastards. If the Hontians were no fools, they would open fire on the blocking detachments with their long-range guns, but it had to be assumed that they were fools, and therefore it had to be assumed that they would engage in mutual extermination—in this mayhem the League would turn against the Union, and the Union would sink its teeth into the backside of the League.

In the meantime our valiant troops would advance deep into enemy territory, and the most interesting part would begin, but unfortunately we wouldn’t see that. Our glorious ironclad torrent would lose its cohesion and start spreading across the country, inevitably moving out of range of the mobile radiation emitters’ influence. If Maxim hadn’t lied about Gai, the men who broke out in this way would immediately start suffering from radiation hangover, which would be all the stronger because the Guards would have spared no energy in whipping them on during the breakthrough… “Massaraksh!” Zef howled. “I can just see those cretins crawling out of their tanks, lying down on the ground, and begging to be shot. And the good-hearted Hontians, not to mention the Hontian soldiers, driven berserk by this hideous outrage, won’t refuse them, of course… There could be unprecedented slaughter!”

The train was picking up speed and the car was energetically rocking from side to side. In the farthest corner, criminal convicts were shooting dice, the lamp was swaying up under the ceiling, and on the lower bunks someone was monotonously muttering—he must have been praying. The air reeked of sweat, dirt, and the bucket latrine. The tobacco smoke stung Maxim’s eyes.

“I think they’re taking that into account at General HQ,” Zef went on, “and so there won’t be any whirlwind breakthroughs. It will be a half-hearted positional war; the Hontians, for all their stupidity, will eventually realize what’s going on, and they’ll start hunting down the radiation emitters… Basically, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he concluded. “I don’t even know if they’ll give us any chow in the morning. I’m afraid they won’t feed us again—why would they bother?”

They said nothing for a while. And then Maxim asked, “Are you certain that we’ve done the right thing? That our place is here?”

“Orders from HQ,” Zef muttered.

“There might be an order,” Maxim objected, “but we’ve got heads on our shoulders too. Maybe it would have been better to decamp with Boar. Maybe we would have been more use in the capital.”

“Maybe,” said Zef, “and maybe not. You heard that Boar is counting on atomic bombing—many of the towers would be destroyed, and free regions would emerge. But what if there isn’t any bombing? Nobody knows anything, Mak. I can picture very clearly to myself the state of bedlam at our HQ… The rightists are strutting and swaggering; heads will roll in the government any day now, and those bastards will scramble for the free places…” He pondered, rummaging in his beard. “Boar spun us a line about the bombing. But I don’t think that was why he headed for the capital. I know him, he’s been creeping up on those leaderist types for a long time… so it’s quite possible that heads will roll at our HQ too…”

“So it’s bedlam at our HQ as well,” Maxim slowly said. “So they’re not ready either…”

“How could they be ready?” Zef protested. “Some of them dream of destroying the towers, but others dream of keeping them… The underground isn’t a political party, it’s like a mixed salad, with shrimp…”

“Yes, I know…” said Maxim. “A mixed salad.”

The underground wasn’t a political party. In fact, the underground wasn’t even a front of political parties. Specific circumstances had split its HQ into two irreconcilable groups: categorical opponents of the towers and categorical supporters of the towers. All these people were more or less opposed to the existing order of things, but, massaraksh, their motivations diverged so widely!

There were “sociobiologists,” who absolutely couldn’t care less who was in power, whether it was Dad, who was a major dynastic financier, the head of an entire clan of bankers and industrialists, or a democratic union of representatives of the working strata of society. All they wanted was for the cursed towers to be razed to the ground and for everyone to be able to live like human beings, as they put it—that is, to live in the old, prewar manner.

There were aristocrats, the surviving remnants of the privileged classes of the old empire, who still believed that what was happening was merely a protracted, lingering misunderstanding, that the people still remained loyal to the legitimate heir to the imperial throne (a dismal, hulking brute of a man, who drank heavily and suffered from nosebleeds), and that it was only these absurd towers, the criminal brainchild of professors from His Imperial Highness’s Academy of Sciences who had betrayed their oath of allegiance, that prevented our kind, simple-hearted people from manifesting their genuine, genial, simple-hearted devotion to their legitimate lords and masters.

The unconditional destruction of the towers was also supported by the revolutionaries—the local communists and socialists, such as Wild Boar, who had become well versed in theory and well seasoned in practice during the prewar class struggles. For them the destruction of the towers was merely an essential condition for a return to the natural course of history, a signal for the beginning of a series of revolutions that would eventually lead to a just social order. Siding with them were the rebelliously inclined intellectuals such as Zef or the late Gel Ketshef—simply honest people, who regarded the towers as a repulsive and dangerous venture, steering humankind into a dead end.

The leaderists, the liberals, and the enlighteners were in favor of keeping the towers. The leaderists—the extreme right wing of the underground—were, in Zef’s estimation, simply a band of power-seekers who were desperate to obtain departmental appointments, and their efforts were sometimes successful. A certain Kalu the Swindler, who had managed to scramble his way into the Department of Propaganda, had once been a prominent leader of this fascist group. These political bandits were prepared to employ any means at all in their frenzied opposition to any government, if it was composed without their participation.

The liberals were in general opposed to both the towers and the Unknown Fathers. However, what they feared most of all was civil war. They were national patriots, extremely protective of the glory and might of the state, and apprehensive that the destruction of the towers might lead to chaos, a general desecration of sacred values, and the irretrievable disintegration of the nation. They were in the underground because they were all, to a man, supporters of parliamentary forms of government…

And as for the enlighteners, they were undoubtedly honest, sincere people, and far from stupid. They hated the tyranny of the Fathers and were categorically opposed to the use of the towers to deceive the masses, but they considered the towers to be a powerful means for educating the people. They regarded the modern individual as being both a savage and a beast by his very nature. Educating such individuals using the classic methods would require centuries and centuries. Burning out the beast in the human being, strangling the individual’s animal instincts, teaching him to feel kindness and love for his neighbor, teaching him to hate ignorance, falsehood, and philistinism—that was a noble goal, and with the assistance of the towers, this goal could be achieved within a single generation.

There were too few communists, because they had almost all been killed during the war and the coup; nobody took the aristocrats seriously; the liberals were too passive and frequently didn’t know themselves what they wanted. And so the largest and most influential groups in the underground were the sociobiologists, the leaderists, and the enlighteners. They had almost nothing in common, and the underground had neither a unified program, nor a unified leadership, nor a unified strategy, nor unified tactics…

“Yes, a mixed salad…” Maxim repeated. “It’s sad. I had hoped that the underground was intending to somehow exploit the war… the potentially revolutionary situation…”

“The underground knows damn all,” Zef morosely said. “How do we know what it’s like—a war with radiation emitters right behind you?”

“You’re all totally worthless,” Maxim exclaimed, unable to hold back.

Zef immediately flared up. “Why, you!” he barked. “Ease up, now! Who are you to say what we’re worth? Where did you spring from, massaraksh, to start demanding this and that from us? Do you want a combat mission? By all means. See everything, survive, go back, and report. Does that sound too easy for you? Excellent! So much the better for us… And that’s enough. I want to sleep.”

He demonstratively turned his back on Maxim and suddenly yelled at the dice players, “Hey, you grave diggers down there! Go to sleep! Onto your bunks.”

Maxim lay down on his back, put his hands behind his head, and started looking up at the ceiling of the car. Something was crawling across the ceiling. The grave diggers were quietly and spitefully arguing as they settled down to sleep. The man to the left of him was groaning and whining in his sleep—he was doomed, and he was probably sleeping for the last time in his life. And the men around him—snoring, sniffling, tossing and turning—were probably sleeping for the last time in their lives. The world was a lackluster yellowish color, stifling and hopeless. The wheels hammered, the locomotive howled, a smell of burning blew in through the little barred window, and outside the window this weary, hopeless country went hurtling past, this country of cheerless slaves, this country of the doomed, this country of walking puppets…

Everything has rotted here, thought Maxim. Not a single living person. Not a single clear head. And I’ve ended up in a fine mess again, because I put my hope in someone or something. You can’t count on anything here. You can’t rely on anything here. Only on yourself. And what good am I on my own? I know that much history at least. A man alone ain’t got no bloody chance…

Maybe the Sorcerer’s right? Maybe I should abstract myself from it all? Calmly and coolly, from the height of my knowledge of the inescapable future, observe the raw material seething, boiling, and melting, the naive, clumsy, and amateurish fighters rising and falling; watch as time forges them into Damascus steel and plunges that steel into torrents of bloody filth to temper it, with the slag sprinkling down in showers of corpses… No, I don’t know how to do that. Even thinking in categories like that is repugnant… It’s a terrible thing—an established equilibrium of forces. But then, the Sorcerer did say that I am also a force. And there is a concrete enemy, which means there is a point to which the force can be applied…

I’ll get whacked here, he suddenly thought. For certain. But not tomorrow! he firmly told himself. That will happen when I manifest myself as a force, and not before. And even then… we’ll see…

The Center, he thought. The Center. That’s what I have to search for, that’s what the organization has to be directed against. And I’ll direct them. I’ll make sure that they do something real… And I’ll make you do something real, my friend. Just listen to how loudly he snores! Snore on, snore on—tomorrow I’ll drag you out of here…

OK, I have to sleep. But when will I ever get a proper sleep? In a big, spacious bed, in fresh sheets. What kind of habit is it they have here, sleeping over and over on the same sheet? Yes, in fresh sheets, and read a good book before I fall asleep, then retract the wall between me and the garden, turn out the light, and go to sleep… and in the morning have breakfast with my father and tell him about this railway car… I can’t tell Mom about it, of course… Mom, you just remember that I’m alive, everything’s all right, and tomorrow nothing’s going to happen to me… And the train keeps on moving, there haven’t been any stops for a long time, obviously somebody somewhere has realized that they can’t start the war without us…

I wonder how Gai’s getting along in his corporals’ car? He probably feels pretty weird right now—they’ve got enthusiasm in there… I haven’t thought about Rada for a long time. Why don’t I think about Rada now… No, this isn’t the time. OK, Maxim, my old friend, you lousy piece of cannon fodder, sleep, he told himself, and immediately dozed off…

He dreamed about the sun, the moon, and the stars. All of them at once; it was such a strange dream. He wasn’t allowed to sleep for long. The train stopped, the heavy door swung open with a creak, and a strident voice bellowed, “Fourth company, out! Move it!”

It was five o’clock in the morning, it was just getting light, mist was hanging in the air, and a fine rain was sprinkling down. The military convicts started feebly clambering out of the railcar, convulsively yawning and shuddering in the chilly air. The corporals were there in an instant, spitefully and impatiently grabbing men by their feet, dragging them down onto the ground, giving the especially sluggish ones a thump, and yelling: “Separate into crews! Line up!” “Where do you think you’re going, you dumb brute? Which platoon are you in?” “You, fat-face, how many times do I have to tell you?” “Where are you off to? You lousy, worthless mob!”

They raggedly sorted themselves out into crews and lined up in front of the railcars. A drunk who had lost his way in the mist ran around looking for his platoon, with abuse being barked at him from all sides. Zef, somber and short on sleep, with his beard bristling, gloomily and distinctly croaked, “Come on, come on, line us up, we’ll wage you lots of war today…” A corporal running by smacked him on the ear, Maxim immediately stuck out his foot, and the corporal went tumbling over in the dirt. The crews roared in delighted laughter.

“Brigade, attention!” someone invisible roared. The battalion commanders started howling, straining themselves hoarse, the company commanders picked up the refrain, and the platoon commanders started dashing around. No one stood to attention; the military convicts huddled over with their hands stuck into their sleeves, skipping about on the spot, the fortunate rich ones smoked without trying to conceal it, someone relieved himself, politely turning his back to the gentlemen commanding officers, and little conversations rippled through the ranks about all the signs indicating that they wouldn’t give the men anything to eat again, and they could go to hell with this damned war of theirs.

“Brigade, stand at ease,” Zef suddenly shouted in a strident voice. “Dismissed! Fall out!” The crews gladly dispersed, but then the corporals started bustling about again, and suddenly guardsmen in gleaming black cloaks came running along the line of railcars, holding their automatic rifles at the ready and stretching out into a sparse cordon. A frightened silence ran along the line of railcars after them; the crews hastily lined up and leveled off, and out of old habit some of the army convicts put their hands behind their heads and spread their legs.

An iron voice from out of the mist said quietly but very clearly, “If any of you scoundrels opens his rotten mouth, I’ll give the order to shoot.” Everybody froze. The minutes wearily stretched out, filled with anticipation. The mist thinned a little bit, revealing a rather ugly station building, wet rails, and telegraph poles. On the right, at the head of the brigade, a dark group of men came into sight. Quiet voices could be heard coming from it, then someone querulously snapped, “Carry out the order!” Maxim squinted back over his shoulder—the guardsmen were standing motionless behind him, glaring out from under their hoods with expressions of suspicion and hatred.

A squat figure in a camouflage coverall separated off from the little group of men. It was the commander of the penal brigade, ex-colonel of tank forces Anipsu, who had been demoted and jailed for trading in government fuel on the black market. He brandished his cane in front of him, jerked up his head, and began his address: “Soldiers!… And that is not a mistake, I am addressing you all as soldiers, although all of us—including myself—are still just shit, the garbage of society… Blackguards and bastards! Be grateful that you have been permitted to go into battle today. In a few hours’ time, almost all of you will be killed, and that will be good. But for those of you scumbags who survive, it will be the beginning of a glorious life. A soldier’s rations, vodka, and all the rest of it. Now we shall move into position, and you will board your vehicles. This is a paltry job—just ride a hundred miles on caterpillar tracks. Making tank soldiers out of you is about as likely as making bullets out of shit, you know that yourselves, but everything that you can get your hands on is yours. Gobble it up. This is your own battle comrade, Anipsu, telling you this. There is no road back, but there is a road forward. If anyone backs down, I’ll incinerate him on the spot. And that especially applies to the drivers… There are no questions. Brigaaade! Rrright turn! Forward… Close up! You blockheads, you centipedes! Close up, I told you. Corporals, massaraksh! Where are your eyes?… A herd of cattle! Separate out into fours… Corporals, sort these swine into fours! Massaraksh…”

With help from the guardsmen, the corporals managed to form up the brigade into a column four men wide, after which the command “Attention” rang out again. Maxim found himself not far away from the brigade commander. The ex-colonel was blind drunk. He stood there, swaying, with his backside perched on his cane, occasionally shaking his head and wiping his furious blue-gray face with the palm of his hand. The battalion commanders, also blind drunk, stayed behind his back—one was senselessly giggling, another was attempting with obtuse stubbornness to light a cigarette, and yet another kept clutching at the peak of his cap and probing the ranks of men with his bloodshot eyes. Men in the ranks enviously sniffed and a muttered murmur of flattering approval could be heard.

“Come on, come on…” Zef muttered. “We’ll wage you lots of war today…”

Maxim irritably jostled Zef with his elbow. “Shut up,” he said through his teeth. “I’m sick of hearing it.”

At that moment two men walked up to the colonel: a cornet with a pipe clenched in his teeth and heavyset individual, a civilian, wearing a long raincoat with the collar raised and a hat. The civilian seemed strangely familiar to Maxim, and he started looking at the man more intently.

The civilian said something to the colonel in a low voice. “Hah?” the colonel exclaimed, turning his murky gaze toward the civilian. The civilian started talking again, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb at the column of military convicts. The cornet indifferently puffed on his pipe. “What for?” the colonel barked.

The civilian took out a piece of paper, and the colonel waved it aside with his hand. “I won’t let you have him,” he said. “Every last one of them has to croak…” The civilian insisted. “And I don’t give a damn!” the colonel replied. “And I don’t give a damn for your department. They’re all going to croak… Aren’t I right?” he asked the cornet.

The cornet didn’t contradict him, but the civilian grabbed the sleeve of the colonel’s coverall and jerked him toward himself, and the colonel almost fell off his cane. The giggling battalion commander broke into peals of idiotic laughter. The colonel’s face darkened in indignation; he reached for his holster and pulled out a huge army pistol. “I’ll count to ten,” he announced to the civilian. “One… two…”

The civilian spat and walked away along the column, looking into the faces of the military convicts, but the colonel kept counting, and when he got to ten, he opened fire. At that point the cornet finally became alarmed and persuaded him to put his weapon away. “Everybody has to croak,” the colonel declared. “Along with me… Brigaaade! On my command! On the double… Forwaaard march!”

And the brigade set off. Tramping along a sloppy trail rutted by caterpillar tracks, slipping and grabbing at each other, the military convicts descended into a marshy hollow, then turned and marched away from the railroad. Here the column was overtaken by the platoon commanders. Gai started walking along beside Maxim; he was pale-faced, working his jaw muscles, and he didn’t say anything for a long time at first, although Zef immediately asked him what was new.

The hollow gradually broadened out, bushes appeared, and up ahead a patch of forest came into view. An immense, unwieldy tank of some ancient type was standing at the edge of the road, where one of its caterpillar tracks had foundered in a wet pothole; it was entirely unlike the patrol tanks of the coastal guard—it had a small, square turret and a little gun. Morose men in oil-stained jackets were tinkering with something beside the tank. The military convicts rambled along haphazardly with their hands stuck in their pockets and their rough collars raised. Many of them cautiously glanced around to see if they could cut and run. The bushes were very tempting, but dark figures with automatic rifles loomed up on the slopes of the hollow every two or three hundred paces.

Three tanker trucks came toward them, floundering through the potholes. The drivers were sullen faced and didn’t look at the military convicts. The rain was growing stronger and the men’s morale was sinking. They walked in silence, like cattle, looking around less and less.

“Listen, platoon commander,” Zef growled, “are they really not going to give us any grub?”

Gai took a hunk of bread out of his pocket and handed it to him. “That’s all,” he said. “Until you die.”

Zef submerged the bread in his beard and started precisely working away with his jaws. This is plain crazy, thought Maxim. They all know they’re going to certain death. But they keep walking. Does that mean they’re hoping for something? Does it mean they have some kind of plan? Yes, right, they don’t know anything about the radiation, do they… Every one of them is thinking, Somewhere farther along the road, I’ll turn off, jump out of the tank, and lie low, and let the other fools go into the attack…

That’s what we’ll start the struggle against the rightists with. We have to write leaflets about the radiation, shout about it in public places, organize radio stations… although the radios only work on two wavelengths… but even so, we can break in during the pauses. No more wasting people on the towers—use them for counterpropaganda instead… But then, all that only comes later, later. I mustn’t get distracted right now. Right now I have to take note of everything. Search for the slightest little cracks…

There were no tanks at the station, and no big guns either, only Guards sharpshooters everywhere. I have to bear that in mind. This is a good hollow, deep, and they’ll probably remove the guards once we get through… But no, no, the guards are irrelevant—the entire crowd will go running forward just as soon as they switch on the radiation emitters… With incredible clarity he pictured to himself how it would all be. The radiation emitters are turned on. The military convicts’ tanks go hurtling forward with a roar. The army men go surging after them in a great torrent. The entire area of the front line is emptied… It was hard to imagine how deep this area was, and he didn’t know the effective range of the radiation emitters, but it had to be at least one or two miles. In a strip of territory one or two miles across, not a single man will be left with a clear head. Apart from me.

Ah, no, not just one or two miles. More than that. All the permanent installations, all the towers—they’ll all be switched on, and probably at full power. The entire border zone will go insane… Massaraksh, what can I do about Zef? He won’t be able to stand it… Maxim squinted at the rhythmically moving ginger beard, at the morose, dirty face of the world-famous scientist. Never mind, he’ll cope. In a real emergency I’ll just have to help him, although I’m afraid I’ll be too busy for that. And then there’s Gai—I mustn’t take my eyes off him for a moment… Yes, I’ll have my work cut out for me. OK. But in the final analysis, in this murky whirlpool, I’ll still be completely in control, and nobody will be able to stop me, or even want to…

They passed the patch of forest, and immediately heard the combined rumbling of loudspeakers, crackling of exhaust pipes, and angry shouts. Up ahead of them, on a shallow, grassy slope rising toward the north, the tanks were standing in three rows. Men were wandering between them, and layers of grayish-blue smoke were hovering in the air. “Look, there are our coffins!” someone at the front exclaimed in a loud, jolly voice.

“Just look what they’re giving us,” said Gai. “Prewar tanks, imperial junk, old tin cans… Listen, Mak, are we really going to croak here, then? This is absolutely certain death…”

“How far is it to the border?” Maxim asked. “And in general, what’s over there—behind the crest of hills?”

“A plain,” Gai replied. “As smooth as a tabletop. The border’s about two miles away, then the hills begin, and they reach all the way—”

“Is there no river?”

“No.”

“Any ravines?”

“N-No… I don’t remember. Why?”

Maxim caught hold of his hand and tightly squeezed it. “Don’t lose heart, boy,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Gai looked up at him with desperate hope in his sunken eyes; the skin was stretched taut over his cheekbones. “Really?” he said. “Because I can’t see any way out at all. They’ve taken away our guns, the tanks have blanks instead of live shells, and there aren’t any machine guns. There’s death ahead of us, and death behind us.”

“Aha!” Zef said with malicious spite, picking his teeth. “Wet your pants, have you? This isn’t as simple as smacking convicts in the teeth.”

The column filed into a gap between the rows of tanks and halted. It became hard to talk. Huge loudspeakers had been set up right there on the grass, and a velvety tape-recorded bass voice was pontificating: “There, beyond the ridge of this hollow, is the perfidious enemy. Forward. Only forward. Pull the levers right back—and forward. Against the enemy. Forward… There, beyond the ridge of this hollow, is the perfidious enemy. Pull the levers right back—and forward…” Then the voice broke off midword and the colonel started yelling. He was standing on the radiator of his off-road vehicle with the battalion commanders holding him by the legs.

“Soldiers!” the colonel yelled. “Enough idle chatter! You see before you your tanks. Everyone to their vehicles! And the drivers above all, because I couldn’t give a damn about the rest of you. But anyone who stays behind…” He took out his pistol and showed it to all of them. “Is that clear, you rotten, lousy pigs? Company commanders, lead the crews to their tanks.”

The men started shoving and jostling. The colonel, swaying like a pole on his radiator, carried on shouting something, but he could no longer be heard, because the loudspeakers had once again started hammering home the message that the enemy lay ahead, and therefore—pull the levers right back. All the military convicts went rushing to the third row of tanks. A fight broke out and steel-tipped boots started flying. The huge, gray crowd slowly seethed around the tanks in the back row. Some tanks started moving and men came scattering down off them. The colonel turned completely blue from the strain of yelling and finally started shooting over the men’s heads. A black line of guardsmen came running out of the patch of forest.

“Let’s go,” said Maxim, taking a firm grip of Gai’s and Zef’s shoulders and leading them to the vehicle on the end of the front row—a sullen, blotchy tank with a flaccidly drooping gun barrel.

“Wait,” Gai jabbered in confusion, looking around. “We’re the fourth company, we’re over that way, in the second row…”

“Go on, go on, then,” Maxim angrily said. “Maybe you want to command a platoon for a while too?”

“A soldier through and through,” said Zef. “Cool it, mama…”

Someone grabbed hold of Maxim’s belt from behind. Without turning back, Maxim tried to free himself, but he couldn’t, and he glanced around. Dragging along behind him, tenaciously clinging on with one hand and wiping his bloodied nose with the other, was the fourth member of the crew, a criminal convict nicknamed Hook.

“Ah,” said Maxim, “I forgot about you. Come on, come on, don’t fall behind…” He noted to himself with displeasure that in the hurly-burly he had forgotten about this man, who had actually been given quite an important role in his plan.

At that moment the Guards’ machine guns started roaring out, bullets started jumping off armor plating with a mewling whine, and they had to double over and run at top speed. Maxim ran in behind the end tank and stopped. “Listen to my orders,” he said. “Hook, start her up. Zef, into the turret; Gai, check the lower hatches—and check them thoroughly, or I’ll have your head!”

He set off around the tank, examining the tracks. There was shooting and yelling and the monotonous droning of the loudspeakers on all sides, but he had promised himself that he wouldn’t be distracted, and he wasn’t distracted, he simply noted to himself: The loudspeakers. Gai. Mustn’t forget him. The tracks were in tolerable condition, but the leading wheels gave cause for concern. Never mind, that’s OK, I don’t have to ride in it for long…

Gai agilely crawled out from under the tank, already dirty, with his hands all scratched. “The hatches are rusted,” he shouted. “I didn’t close them—they have to stay open, right?”

“There, beyond the ridge of this hollow, is the perfidious enemy!” the tape-recorded voice pontificated. “Forward. Only forward. Pull the levers right back…”

Maxim grabbed Gai by the collar and pulled him close. “Do you love me?” he asked, staring into those dilated pupils. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes!” gasped Gai.

“Listen to nobody but me. Don’t listen to anybody else. Everything else is lies. I’m your friend, only me, nobody else. I’m your commander. Remember that. I give the orders—remember that.”

Dumbfounded Gai kept nodding rapidly, soundlessly repeating: “Yes, yes. Yes. Only you. Nobody else…”

“Mak!” someone yelled right in his ear.

Maxim looked around. Standing there in front of him was that strangely familiar civilian, wearing a long raincoat, but no hat any longer. Massaraksh. A square face with peeling skin, and red, puffy eyes… It was Fank! With a bloody scratch on one cheek and a split in his lip…

“Massaraksh!” Fank yelled, trying to shout above the noise. “Have you gone deaf or what? Do you recognize me?”

“Fank,” said Maxim. “What are you doing here?”

Fank wiped the blood off his lip. “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Quick!”

“Where?”

“To get the hell out of here. Let’s go!” He grabbed hold of Maxim’s coverall and pulled.

Maxim flung off his hand. “They’ll kill us!” he shouted. “The Guards!”

Fank shook his head. “Let’s go! I’ve got a pass for you!” And then, seeing that Maxim wasn’t moving, “I’ve searched the entire country for you! Thought I’d never find you! Let’s go immediately!”

“I’m not alone,” Maxim shouted.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not alone,” Maxim bawled. “There are three of us! I won’t go alone!”

“Rubbish! Don’t talk nonsense. What kind of fatuous nobility is this? Are you tired of living?” Fank choked on his own shout and started violently coughing.

Maxim looked around. Pale-faced Gai was looking at him with his lips trembling, holding on to his sleeve—of course, he had heard everything. Two guardsmen were hammering a bloodied military convict into the next tank with their rifle butts.

“One pass!” Fank yelled in a strained voice. “One!” he held up one finger.

Maxim started shaking his head. “There are three of us!” He held up three fingers. “I’m not going anywhere without them!”

Zef’s massive ginger beard was thrust out of the side hatch like a twig broom. Fank licked his lips—he clearly didn’t know what to do.

“Who are you?” Maxim shouted. “What do you want me for?”

Fank briefly glanced at him and started looking at Gai. “Is this one with you?” he shouted.

“Yes! This one too!”

Fank’s eyes turned wild. He stuck his hand in under his raincoat, pulled out a pistol, and aimed the barrel at Gai. Maxim struck Fank’s hand with all his strength from below, and the pistol went flying high into the air. Still not understanding what had happened, Maxim pensively watched it go. Fank doubled over and stuck his injured hand under his armpit.

Gai dealt him a brief and precise blow to the neck, just like in the drills, and he collapsed facedown. Guardsmen suddenly appeared close by, sweaty and grinning with bared teeth after their work, looking haggard in their fury.

“Into the tank!” Maxim barked at Gai, bending down and grabbing Fank under the arms. Fank was bulky and he just barely fit through the hatch. Maxim dived in after him, receiving a blow from a rifle butt to his backside in farewell.

Inside the tank it was as dark and cold as in a crypt, with an intense stench of diesel oil. Zef dragged Fank away from the hatch and laid him out on the floor. “Who’s this?” he barked.

Maxim had no time to answer. Hook, who had been tormenting the starter for a long time with no success, finally got the tank started. Everything began shaking and rattling. Maxim gestured with his hand, clambered into the turret, and stuck his head out. There was nobody left between the tanks apart from guardsmen. All the tanks’ engines were working, there was a hellish roaring, and the slope was enveloped in a stifling cloud of exhaust fumes. Some tanks were moving, here and there heads were jutting out of turrets, and the military convict who was protruding from the turret of the next tank was making signs to Maxim and contorting his bruised, swollen features. Suddenly he disappeared, the engines started roaring with redoubled volume, and all the tanks simultaneously rushed forward, clanging and clattering up the slope.

Maxim felt himself grabbed across the torso and pulled downward. He bent down and saw Gai’s idiotically goggling eyes. Like the other time, in the bomber, Gai kept trying to catch Maxim in his arms, all the time muttering something. His face had become repulsive; there was neither boyishness nor naive courage left in it—only obdurate imbecility and the readiness to become a killer. It’s started, thought Maxim, squeamishly attempting to push the hapless young man away. It’s started, it’s started… They’ve turned on the radiation emitters, it’s started…

The tank scrambled up onto the crest, shuddering, with clods of turf flying out from under its caterpillar tracks. The blue-gray smoke obscured everything behind it, but ahead a gray, clayey plain suddenly opened up, and in the distance the flat hills on the Hontian side heaved into view, with an avalanche of tanks hurtling toward them, maintaining their speed. There were no rows any longer—all the tanks were rushing along, racing each other, brushing against each other, senselessly rotating their turrets…

A caterpillar tread flew off one tank traveling at full speed and the tank started spinning around on the spot and overturned; its other caterpillar track flew off and went soaring up into the sky like a heavy, glittering snake, the lead wheels kept on furiously spinning, and two little figures in gray popped out of the lower hatches, jumped down onto the ground, and ran forward, waving their arms around—forward, only forward, at the perfidious enemy…

There was a flash of fire, the sharp crack of a shot from a tank gun burst through all the clanging and roaring, and all the tanks started firing at once; long, red tongues of flame shot out of their gun barrels, the tanks squatted back and jumped up again, they were enveloped in the dense, black smoke of coarse gunpowder, and a minute later everything was obscured by a blackish-yellow cloud, and Maxim kept watching, unable to tear his eyes away from this spectacle that was so colossal in its criminality, patiently peeling away Gai’s tenacious hands, while Gai kept pulling at him, calling out, imploring, craving to shield Maxim from every danger with his own chest… Men, windup dolls, savage beasts… Men.

Then Maxim came to his senses. It was time to take over the controls. Holding on to the metal rungs, he went down inside, on the way slapping Gai on the shoulder—Gai started thrashing about in hysterical ecstasy. Maxim looked around in the cramped, lurching box, almost choking on the stench of gasoline, made out Fank’s deathly pale face, with its eyes rolled up and back, and Zef huddled up under a shell crate. He shoved aside Gai, who was devotedly clinging to him, and squeezed through to the driver.

Hook was jerking the levers back, putting on as much speed as he could. He was singing, yelling in such an appalling voice that he could actually be heard, and Maxim even made out the words of the Song of Thanksgiving. Now he had to somehow pacify Hook, take his place, and find a convenient ravine, or a deep hollow, or some kind of hill in all this smoke, so they would have somewhere to take shelter against atomic explosions…

But things didn’t go to plan. The moment he started cautiously unclasping Hook’s fists, which had frozen onto the levers, his devoted slave Gai, seeing his lord being defied, pushed his way in from the side and dealt the crazed Hook a terrible blow on the temple with a huge spanner. Hook slumped down, went limp, and let go of the levers. With savage fury, Maxim flung Gai aside, but it was already too late, and there was no time to feel horror and sympathy. He dragged the corpse out of the way, sat down, and took the controls.

He could see almost nothing through the observation hatch, just a small patch of clayey soil with a sparse covering of blades of grass, and beyond that a blank shroud of bluish-gray fumes. Finding anything in that was out of the question. There was only one thing left to do—slow down and keep cautiously moving while the tank traveled deeper into the hills. However, slowing down was dangerous too. If the atomic mines started exploding before he reached the hills, he could be blinded, or even completely incinerated.

Gai rubbed up against him from the right and the left, peering into his face, petitioning for orders. “It’s all right, old buddy…” Maxim muttered, elbowing him away. “It will pass… Everything will pass, everything will be fine…” Gai saw that Maxim was talking to him and shed a mortified tear, because once again, like the time in the bomber, he couldn’t hear a word.

The tank shot through a dense trail of black smoke—on their left a tank was on fire. They hurtled past it and had to abruptly swerve to the right, to avoid driving over a dead man squashed flat by caterpillar tracks. A crooked border sign emerged from the smoke and disappeared again, followed by tattered, crumpled tangles of barbed wire. A man in a strange white helmet stuck his head up for a moment out of an inconspicuous little ditch, furiously waved his fists in the air, and immediately disappeared, as if he had dissolved into the ground.

The shroud of smoke ahead thinned out a little, and Maxim saw round, brownish hills, very close, and the mud-spattered side of a tank that for some reason was creeping diagonally across the general movement, and then another blazing tank. Maxim steered away to the left, aiming his tank into a deep saddle, overgrown with bushes, between two of the slightly higher hills. He was already close when flames came spurting out toward him, and the entire tank rang from a terrible blow. In his surprise, Maxim switched to full speed ahead, the bushes and the cloud of white smoke hanging over them leaped toward him, he glimpsed white helmets, faces contorted in hatred, raised fists, and then something gave a metallic crack as it broke under his tank’s caterpillar tracks.

Maxim gritted his teeth, made a steep turn to the right, and drove his tank as far away as he could from that spot, moving across the slope, sharply heeling over, almost overturning, skirting around the hill, and finally drove into a narrow hollow overgrown with small, young trees. Here he stopped, threw back the front hatch, thrust himself out to the waist, and looked around. This was a suitable spot—the tank was closely surrounded on all sides by high, brownish slopes. Maxim turned off the engine, and immediately Gai started howling some kind of devoted nonsense in a high falsetto voice, something absurdly rhymed, a kind of homespun ode in honor of his greatest and most beloved Mak—the kind of song a dog might compose about its master if it learned to use human language.

“Be quiet,” Maxim ordered. “Drag these men out of here and lay them out beside the tank… Stop, I haven’t finished yet! Do it carefully, these are my beloved friends—our beloved friends.”

“But where are you going?” Gai asked in horror.

“I’ll be here, close by.”

“Don’t go away,” Gai whined. “Or allow me to go with you.”

“You’re disobeying me,” Maxim sternly said. “Do as I told you. And do it carefully—remember that these are our friends.”

Gai started whining, but Maxim wasn’t listening any longer. He clambered out of the tank and ran up the slope of the hill. Somewhere not far away tanks were still moving, their engines strenuously roaring, their caterpillar tracks clanging, their guns occasionally booming. A shell whistled high into the sky. Hunching over, Maxim ran up onto the summit of the hill, squatted down among the bushes, and commended himself once again for making such a shrewd choice.

Down below, a mere stone’s throw away, there was a broad corridor between the hills, and an unbroken torrent of tanks was pouring through that corridor, streaming into it from the smoke-covered plain—low, squat, powerful tanks, with huge, flat turrets and long guns. These weren’t the military convicts, it was the regular army driving by. Deafened and stunned, for several minutes Maxim observed this spectacle, as appalling and improbable as a historical movie. The air oscillated and shuddered from the furious rumbling and roaring, the hill trembled under his feet like a frightened animal, yet somehow it seemed to Maxim that the tanks were moving in somber, menacing silence. He knew perfectly well that inside them, behind the armor plating, crazed soldiers were hoarsely croaking in delirious enthusiasm, but all the hatches were tightly sealed, and each tank seemed to be a solid ingot of inanimate metal…

When the final tanks had passed by, Maxim looked back and down at his own tank, heeled over to one side among the trees, and it seemed to him like a pitiful tin toy, a decrepit parody of a genuine battle machine. Yes, a Force had passed by below… on its way to encounter another, even more terrible Force. Recalling that other Force, Maxim hastily slithered back down into the grove of trees.

He rounded the tank and stopped.

They were lying in a short row: Fank, so white that he was almost blue, looking like a dead man; Zef, huddled up and groaning, clutching his ginger thatch with dirty-white fingers; and merrily smiling Hook, with a doll’s dead eyes. Maxim’s order had been carried out to the letter.

But Gai was also lying there a short distance away, all tattered and covered in blood, with his dead, offended face turned away from the sky and his arms flung out wide; the grass around him was crushed and trampled, and there was a flattened white helmet covered in dark blotches, and someone else’s feet in boots were sticking out of the smashed and broken bushes. “Massaraksh,” Maxim murmured in horror, picturing to himself how only a few minutes ago two snarling, howling dogs had fought to the death here, each striving for the glory of its own master…

And at that moment, that other Force struck its counterblow.

This blow caught Maxim on the eyes. He snarled at the pain, squeezed his eyes shut with all his might, and dropped down onto Gai, already knowing that he was dead but nonetheless trying to shield him with his own body. It was a pure reflex response; he didn’t have time to think about anything or even feel anything except for the pain in his eyes—he was still falling when his brain switched itself off.

When the world around him became tolerable for human perception once again, his awareness switched back on. Probably only a very short time had passed by, only a few seconds, but Maxim came around covered in copious sweat, with a dry throat, and his head was ringing as if he had been struck on the ear with a plank of wood. Everything around him had changed: the world had turned crimson, the world was piled high with leaves and broken branches, the world was filled with incandescent air, and there were bushes, torn up by the roots, burning boughs of trees, and lumps of hot, dry earth raining down from the red sky. And a ghastly, ringing silence.

The living and the dead had been rolled aside. Gai was lying facedown about ten paces away, covered with leaves. Zef was sitting beside him, still holding his head with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. Fank had gone slithering down the slope, getting jammed in a rain gully, and now he was scrambling around in it, scraping his face against the ground. The tank had also been swept lower and overturned. And dead Hook was now leaning back against a caterpillar track, still merrily smiling…

Maxim jumped to his feet, casting aside the branches heaped over him. He ran over to Gai, grabbed hold of him, lifted him up, looked into his glassy eyes, pressed his own cheek against his friend’s, cursed this world and cursed it thrice again, a world in which he was so alone and so helpless, where the dead became dead forever, because there was no way, nothing with which to return them to life… He thought that he wept, hammered his fists on the ground, and trampled the white helmet, and then Zef started screaming in long, drawn-out screeches of pain, and Maxim came to his senses and, without looking around, no longer feeling anything except hate and a yearning to kill, trudged back up the slope to his observation post…

Everything had changed here too. There weren’t any bushes any longer, the baked clay was steaming and cracking, and the slope facing northward was on fire. In the north the crimson sky merged into a sheer wall of blackish-brown smoke, and rising up above that wall, swelling up even as he watched, were strange, bright orange, oily, greasy storm clouds. And a light, damp wind, like a draft drawn into the ash pan of this hellish furnace that had been constructed by misfortunate fools for other misfortunate fools, was blowing toward that spot where thousands of thousands of tons of incandescent ash, and hopes of surviving and living, all cremated and reduced to atoms, were soaring up toward the firmament of heaven, which had snapped under the blow.

Maxim looked down into the corridor between the hills. The corridor was empty; the clay, plowed up by caterpillar tracks and seared by the atomic blast, was smoking, with thousands of little fires dancing on it—smoldering leaves and torn-off branches burning out. And the plain to the south seemed very broad and very deserted; it was no longer obscured by powder fumes, it was red, under a red sky, with solitary, motionless little boxes on it—the wrecked and ruined tanks of the military convicts—and a sparse, jagged line of strange machines was already moving across it, approaching the hills.

They looked like tanks, only at the spot where the artillery turret should have been, each of them had a tall latticework cone with a dull, rounded object at its summit. They were traveling fast, gently swaying over uneven sections of ground, and they weren’t black like the tanks of the unfortunate military convicts, or grayish-green like the army’s assault tanks—they were yellow, the bright, jolly yellow of the Guards patrol vehicles… The right flank of the line was already out of sight behind the hills, and Maxim only had time to count eight radiation emitters. He seemed to sense the insolence in them, these masters of the situation. They were going into battle but didn’t consider it necessary to conceal or camouflage themselves; they deliberately made an exhibition of themselves with their bright coloring, and their ugly five-yard-high humps, and the absence of any normal weapons.

The men driving these vehicles and controlling these machines must consider themselves perfectly safe. But then, they probably weren’t even thinking about that, they were simply hurrying forward, their radiation whips lashing on the iron herd that was stampeding through hell at that moment, and they almost certainly knew nothing about those whips, just as they didn’t know that those whips were lashing them too…

Maxim saw that the radiation emitter on the left flank of the line was heading into the hollow, and he set off down the slope of the hill to meet it. He walked at his full height. He knew that he would have to extract the black cattle-herders out of their iron shell by force, and he wanted that. Never in his life had he wanted anything so badly as he now wanted to feel living flesh under his fingers…

When he reached the bottom of the hollow, the radiation emitter was already very close. The yellow machine came hurtling straight at him, blindly staring with the glass lenses of its periscopes, its latticework cone ponderously swaying, unsynchronized with the bobbing of the vehicle, and now he could see the silvery sphere, bristling with close-set, glittering needles, that was swaying on its summit.

They never even thought of stopping, and Maxim stepped out of the way, letting them pass, ran along beside them for a few yards, and jumped up onto the armor plating.