The Inhabited Island

1

Maxim opened the hatch a little way, stuck his head out, and apprehensively glanced at the sky. The sky was low and solid-looking, without that frivolous transparency that hints at the unfathomable depth of the cosmos and a multitude of inhabited worlds; it was a genuine biblical firmament, smooth and impervious. And this firmament, which no doubt rested on the mighty shoulders of some local Atlas, was lit by an even phosphorescent glow. Maxim searched at its zenith for the hole punched through it by his ship, but there wasn’t any hole, only two large black blots, spreading out like drops of ink in water. Maxim swung the hatch all the way open and jumped down into the tall, dry grass.

The air was hot and thick, with a smell of dust, old iron, crushed vegetation, and life. There was also a smell of death, ancient and incomprehensible. The grass came up to his waist, and there were dark thickets of bushes close by, with dismal, crooked trees haphazardly jutting up out of them. It was almost light, like a bright, moonlit night on Earth, only without any moonlight shadows and without any of that bluish moonlight haze; everything was gray, dusty, and flat. His ship was standing at the bottom of an immense depression with gently sloping sides. The terrain around the ship rose noticeably toward an indistinct horizon. And this was strange, because nearby a river, a large, calm river, flowed to the west, uphill across the slope of the depression.

Maxim walked around the ship, running his hand over its cold, slightly damp flank. He found traces of impacts where he was expecting them. A deep, nasty-looking dent below the indicator ring—that was when the ship suddenly jerked and flipped over onto its side and the cyberpilot took offense, so that Maxim had to hastily override the controls. And there was a notch beside the right visual sensor iris—that was ten seconds later, when the ship was set on its nose and went blind in one eye. Maxim looked up at the zenith of the sky again. The black blots were barely even visible now. A meteorite strike in the stratosphere; probability zero point zero zero… But every possible event occurred at some time or other, didn’t it?

Maxim stuck his head back into the cabin, set the controls to self-repair, activated the express laboratory, and walked toward the river. This is an adventure, of course, but it’s still just routine. Boring. For us in the FSG, even adventures are routine. A meteorite strike, a radiation strike, an accident on landing. An accident on landing, a meteorite strike, a radiation strike… Adventures of the body.

The tall, brittle grass rustled and crunched under his feet, and the prickly seeds clung to his shorts. A cloud of some kind of midges flew at him, whining and droning, jostled about right in front of his face, and then left him alone. Serious, grown-up people don’t join the Free Search Group. They have their own serious, grown-up business to deal with, and they know that all these alien planets are essentially tiresome and humdrum. Tiresomely humdrum. Humdrumly tiresome. But, of course, if you’re twenty years old, if you don’t really know how to do anything much, if you don’t really know what you would like to do, if you still haven’t learned to appreciate the most important thing that you possess—time—and if you don’t have any special talents or the prospect of acquiring any, if the impulse that dominates your entire being at the age of twenty still emanates, as it did ten years ago, not from your head but from your hands and feet, if you are still primitive enough to imagine that on unknown planets you can discover some precious object or other that is quite impossible on Earth, if, if, if… Well then, of course—take the catalog, open it at any page, jab your finger at any line, and go flying off. Discover a planet, give it your own name, and determine its physical characteristics; do battle with monsters, if any such should be found there; establish contact, should there be anyone with whom to do so; or play Robinson Crusoe for a while, should you not discover anyone…

And it’s not as if all this is pointless. They’ll thank you and tell you that you have contributed to the best of your ability, and they’ll summon you for a detailed discussion with an eminent specialist… Schoolchildren, especially the backward ones, and definitely those in the youngest classes, will regard you with respect, but when you meet your Teacher, he will merely inquire, So you’re still in the FSG, then? He’ll change the subject, and his expression will be guilty and sad, because he blames himself for the fact that you’re still in the FSG, and your father will say, Hmm… and hesitantly offer you a job as a lab technician, and your mother will say, Maxie, but you used to draw really well as a child, and Oleg will say, How much longer? Stop disgracing yourself like this, and Jenny will say, Let me introduce you to my husband. And they’ll be right, everyone will be right, apart from you. And you’ll go back to the FSG central office and there, trying hard not to look at the other two blockheads just like you who are rummaging through the catalogs on the next set of shelves, you’ll take down yet another volume, open it at random to any page, and jab your finger at it…

Before walking down the ridge to the river, Maxim looked around. Behind him the grass he had trampled down was straightening out, raggedly jutting back up, the crooked trees were black silhouettes against the background of the sky, and the open hatch was a bright little circle. Everything was very normal. Well, OK, he said to himself. So be it… It would be good to find a civilization—powerful, ancient, and wise. And human… He went down to the water.

The river really was large and slow, and to the naked eye it clearly appeared to flow down from the east and up toward the west (however, the refraction here was horrendous). It was also obvious that the opposite bank was shallow and overgrown with thick rushes, and a half mile upstream Maxim could see some kinds of columns and crooked beams jutting up out of the water and a twisted latticework of girders, entangled in shaggy, creeping plants. Civilization, Maxim thought without any particular enthusiasm. He could sense a lot of iron on all sides, and something else as well, something very unpleasant and asphyxiating; when he scooped up a handful of water, he realized that it was radiation, rather strong and pernicious. The river was carrying along radioactive substances from the east, and that made it clear to Maxim that there was little to be gained from this civilization, that once again this was not what was required. It would be best not to establish contact; he should just carry out the standard analyses, unobtrusively fly around the planet a couple of times, and clear out of here. And then, back on Earth, he would hand over his materials to the morose, worldly-wise gentlemen of the Galactic Security Council, and forget about all of this as quickly as possible.

He fastidiously shook his fingers and wiped them on the sand, then squatted down and started pondering. He tried to picture the inhabitants of this planet, which could hardly be thriving and trouble-free. Somewhere beyond the forests was a city, also unlikely to be thriving: dirty factories, decrepit reactors dumping radioactive gunk in the river; ugly, barbaric buildings with sheet-iron roofs, large expanses of wall, and not many windows; dirty gaps between the buildings, piled high with refuse and the corpses of domestic pets; a large moat around the city, with drawbridges over it… but, no, that was before reactors. And the people: he tried to picture the people, but he couldn’t. He only knew that they were wearing a lot of clothes, that they were densely packed into thick, coarse material and had high, white collars that rubbed their chins sore… Then he saw the tracks in the sand.

They were the tracks of bare feet. Someone had come down off the ridge and walked into the water. Someone with large, broad feet, someone heavy, pigeon-toed and clumsy—definitely humanoid, but with six toes on each foot. Grunting and groaning, he had scrambled down the ridge, hobbled across the sand, plunged into the radioactive water with a splash, and swum, wheezing and snorting, to the opposite bank, into the rushes. All without removing his high, white collar.

Everything on all sides was suddenly lit up by a bright blue flash, like a lightning strike, instantly followed by rumbling, hissing, and crackling above the ridge. Maxim jumped to his feet. Dry earth came pouring down the ridge, and something shot up into the sky with a threatening screech, fell into the middle of the river, and sent up a fountain of spray mingled with white steam. Maxim started swiftly running up the slope. He already knew what had happened, he just didn’t understand why, and he wasn’t surprised when, at the spot where his ship had just been standing, he saw a swirling column of incandescent smoke, a gigantic corkscrew ascending into the phosphorescent vault of the heavens. The ship had burst, and its ceramite shell was flickering with a purple glow; the dry grass around it was merrily burning, the bushes were blazing, and smoky little flames were catching hold of the gnarled trees. The furious heat struck Maxim in the face, and he shielded himself with his open hand, backing away along the ridge—first one step, then another, then another, and another… He inched backward, keeping his watering eyes fixed on the magnificent beauty of this incandescent torch, this sudden volcano, scattering its crimson and green sparks, and the senseless frenzy of the rampaging energy.

No, it’s obvious why, he thought in dismay. A big monkey showed up, saw I wasn’t there, climbed inside, and raised the deck. I don’t even know how to do that, but the monkey figured it out—it was a very quick-witted monkey, with six toes. Anyway, it raised the deck… What do we have in there, under the deck in our ships? Anyway, it found the batteries, took a big rock—and wham! A very big rock, weighing about three tons, and it took a swing… An absolutely massive, mega-huge kind of monkey… And it made a total wreck of my ship with its cobblestone—two hits up there in the stratosphere already, and now one down here too… An incredible story; I don’t think anything like that has ever happened before. But what am I supposed to do now? They’ll miss me soon enough, of course, but even when they do miss me, they’re not very likely to believe that such a thing is possible—the ship has been destroyed but the pilot is still in one piece. What’s going to happen now? My mother… My father… My Teacher…

He turned his back to the conflagration and walked away, moving quickly along the river. Everything around him was illuminated by red light, and his shadow on the grass in front of him kept shortening and lengthening by turns. On his right a sparse forest began, smelling of decaying leaves, and the grass turned soft and damp. Two large nocturnal birds cacophonously shot up from right under his feet and fluttered away, low above the water, toward the far bank. He fleetingly thought that the fire might overtake him and then he would have to escape by swimming, and that would be really obnoxious. Then the red light on all sides faded and went out completely, and he realized that, unlike him, the fire-fighting devices had finally figured out what had happened and performed their designated function with their usual dependable thoroughness. He vividly pictured to himself the smoke-blackened, half-melted cylinders, absurdly jutting up amid the blazing debris, belching out dense clouds of pyrophage and feeling very pleased with themselves.

Calmly now, he thought. The important thing is not to do anything rash. There’s plenty of time. In fact, I’ve got heaps and heaps of time. They can search for me for all eternity; the ship’s gone and it’s impossible to find me. And until they understand what happened, until they’re absolutely certain, they won’t tell my mother anything. And I’ll come up with something or other here.

He passed by a small, cool swamp, scrambled through some bushes, and came out onto a road, an old, cracked concrete road that ran off into the forest. Stepping over the concrete slabs, he walked to the edge of the ridge and saw the rusty girders, overgrown with creepers—the remains of some large latticework structure, half immersed in the water. And on the far bank he saw the continuation of the road, barely distinguishable under the glowing sky. Apparently there had once been a bridge here. And apparently someone had found this bridge a nuisance and had knocked it down into the river, which had not rendered it either more beautiful or more convenient. Maxim sat down on the edge of the ridge and dangled his legs. He carefully scrutinized his inner condition, reassured himself that he wasn’t doing anything rash, and started thinking.

I’ve found the main thing I need. There’s a road right here. A bad road, a crude road, and, what’s more, an old road, but nonetheless a road, and on all inhabited planets roads lead to those who built them. What else do I need? I don’t need food. That is, I could eat a bit, but that’s just my primeval instincts at work, and we’ll suppress them for now. I won’t need water for at least a day and a night. There’s plenty of air, although I’d prefer it if the atmosphere contained less carbon dioxide and radioactive filth. So I don’t have any basic physical needs to appease. But I do need a small—in fact, to be honest, a quite primitive little—null-transmitter with a spiral circuit. What could be simpler than a primitive null-transmitter? Only a primitive null-battery. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the circuit of a transmitter based on positron emitters immediately surfaced out of his memory. If he had the components, he could assemble the little doodad in a jiffy, without even opening his eyes. He mentally ran through the assembly process several times, but when he opened his eyes, there was still no transmitter. There wasn’t anything.

Robinson Crusoe, he thought with a strange feeling of curiosity. Maxim Crusoe, that is. Well, well—I don’t have a thing. Just shorts with no pockets and a pair of sneakers. But I do have an island, an inhabited one. And since the island is inhabited, there’s always hope that I might find a primitive null-transmitter. He earnestly attempted to think about a null-transmitter but didn’t manage it very well. He kept seeing his mother all the time, as she was being informed, “Your son has disappeared without a trace,” and the expression on her face, and his father rubbing his cheeks and confusedly looking around, and how cold and empty they felt… No, he told himself. Thinking about that isn’t allowed. Anything else at all but not that, otherwise I’ll never get anything done. I command and forbid. Command myself not to think about it and forbid myself to think about it. No more. He got up and set off along the road.

The forest, initially timid and sparse, gradually grew bolder, advancing closer and closer to the road. Several small, impudent young trees had already smashed through the concrete and were growing right there in the roadway. The road was obviously several decades old, or at least it had been several decades since it was used. The forest at the sides rose higher and higher, growing thicker and thicker, and in places the branches intertwined above Maxim’s head. It got dark, and loud, guttural whoops started ringing out in the thickets, now on the left, now on the right. Something in there was stirring about, rustling and trampling. At one point something squat and dark, hunched down low, ran across the road about twenty steps ahead of him. Gnats droned.

It suddenly occurred to Maxim that this area was so neglected and wild, there might not be any people nearby, and it might take him several days and nights to reach them. Maxim’s primeval instincts were roused once again, but he could sense that he was surrounded by plenty of live meat here and he wouldn’t starve to death, that it probably wouldn’t all taste great but it would be interesting to do a bit of hunting anyway. And since he was forbidden to think about the really important things, he started remembering how he and Oleg used to go hunting with the park ranger Adolph, with just their bare hands, cunning against cunning, reason against instinct, strength against strength, three days and nights at a stretch, chasing a deer through tangled, fallen trees, catching it, grabbing it by the horns, and tumbling it over onto the ground… Maybe there weren’t any deer here, but there was no reason to doubt that the local game was edible; the moment he started pondering and got distracted, the gnats started ferociously devouring him, and everyone knew that you wouldn’t starve to death on an alien planet if you yourself were edible there.

It would be fun to lose my way here and spend a year or two roaming through the forest. I could acquire a companion—some kind of wolf or bear—and we’d go hunting together and talk… only I’d get bored eventually, of course. And then, it doesn’t look like I could get any pleasure out of wandering through these woods; there’s too much iron everywhere, there’s nothing to breathe… And anyway, first of all I have to assemble a null-transmitter…

Maxim stopped and listened. He could hear a hollow, monotonous booming from somewhere deep in the forest thickets, and he realized that he had been hearing this booming for a long time already but had only just noticed it. It wasn’t an animal and it wasn’t a waterfall—it was a mechanism, some kind of barbaric machine. It was snorting, bellowing, grating metal on metal, and scattering hideous, rusty smells. And it was getting closer.

Maxim crouched down and ran toward it without making a sound, sticking close to the side of the road, and abruptly stopped when he almost went darting out into an intersection. The road was intersected at right angles by another highway, a very muddy one, with deep, ugly ruts, and fragments of concrete slabs jutting up out of it. It was foul smelling and very, very radioactive. Maxim squatted down on his haunches and looked to his left, the direction from which the roaring of an engine and metallic rasping sounds were advancing. The ground under his feet began shuddering. It was getting even closer.

A minute later it appeared—nonsensically huge, hot, and stinking, made completely out of riveted metal, smashing down the road with its monstrous caterpillar tracks caked in mud. It didn’t hurtle or trundle along, it barged its way forward, slovenly and hunchbacked, jangling sheets of iron that had come loose, stuffed full of raw plutonium and lanthanides. Moronic and menacing, with no human presence in it, mindless and dangerous, it lumbered across the intersection and went barging on, smashing the concrete, setting it crunching and squealing, and leaving behind a trail of incandescent, sweltering air as it disappeared into the forest, still lumbering and growling, until it moved away into the distance and gradually grew quieter.

Maxim caught his breath and brushed off the midges. He was astounded. He had never seen anything so absurd and preposterous in his entire life. Yes, he thought. I won’t get hold of any positron emitters here. As he watched the receding monster, he suddenly noticed that the intersecting road was not simply a road but also a kind of firebreak, a narrow gap cut through the forest: the trees didn’t cover the sky above it as they did above the first road. Maybe he ought to chase after the monster, he thought. Overtake it, stop it, and extinguish the reactor…

He listened closely; the forest was full of clamor, and the monster was wallowing about in the thickets, like a hippopotamus in a quagmire. Then the roaring of the engine started moving closer again. It was coming back. The same wheezing and growling, a surging wave of stench, clanging and rattling, and then it lumbered across the intersection again and barged back toward where it had just come from… No, said Maxim. I don’t want to get involved with it. I don’t like malicious animals and barbaric automatons. He waited for the monster to disappear from sight, walked out of the bushes, got a running start, and flew across the ripped-up, polluted intersection in a single leap.

For a while he walked very quickly, taking deep breaths in order to clear the iron behemoth’s fumes out of his lungs, and then switched back to his hiking stride. He thought about what he had seen during the first two hours of life on his inhabited island and tried to assemble all these incongruous, chance events into a whole that was logically consistent. However, it was too difficult. The picture that emerged was fantastical, not real. This forest, stuffed full of old iron, was fantastical, and in it fantastical creatures called to each other in voices that were almost human. Just like in a fairy tale, an old, abandoned road led to an enchanted castle, and invisible, wicked sorcerers tried their damnedest to make life difficult for anyone who had ended up in this country. On the distant approaches, they had pelted him with meteorites, but that didn’t work, so then they had burned his ship, thereby trapping their victim, and then sent out an iron dragon to get him. However, the dragon had proved to be too old and stupid, and by now they had probably realized their blunder and were preparing something a bit more modern.

Listen, Maxim told them. After all, I’m not planning to disenchant any enchanted castles and awaken your lethargic beauties. All I want is to meet one of you who is pretty bright and will help me with finding some positron emitters.

But the wicked sorcerers dug in their heels. First they set a huge, rotten tree across the roadway, then they demolished the concrete surface, dug a large pit in the ground, and filled it with rank-smelling radioactive slurry, and when even that didn’t help, when the gnats grew disillusioned with biting him and abandoned him, as morning approached the sorcerers released a cold, wicked mist from out of the forest. The mist gave Maxim chilly shivers, and he set off at a run in order to warm himself up. The mist was viscous and oily, with a smell of wet metal and putrefaction, but soon it started smelling of smoke, and Maxim realized that a fire was burning somewhere nearby.

Dawn was breaking, and the sky was already almost bright with the grayness of morning, when Maxim saw the campfire at the side of the road, by a low, moss-covered stone structure with a collapsed roof and empty, black windows. Maxim couldn’t see any people, but he could sense that they were somewhere nearby, that they had been here just recently and perhaps they would soon come back. He turned off the road, jumped across the roadside ditch, and set off, sinking up to his ankles in rotting leaves, toward the fire.

The campfire greeted him with its benign, primeval warmth, pleasantly agitating his slumbering instincts. Everything here was simple. Without having to greet anyone, he could squat down, reach out his hands to the flames, and wait, without saying anything, until the equally taciturn owner of the campfire handed him a hot dollop of food and a hot mug. Of course, the owner wasn’t there, but a smoke-blackened cooking pot containing a pungent-smelling concoction was hanging above the campfire, and two loose coveralls of coarse material were lying a little distance away, beside a dirty, half-empty bag with shoulder straps that contained huge, dented tin mugs and some other metal objects with indeterminate functions.

Maxim sat by the fire for a while, warming himself up and looking into the flames, then got to his feet and went into the building. In fact, all that remained of the building was a stone box. He could see the brightening sky through the broken beams above his head, and it was frightening to step on the rotten boards of the floor. Bunches of bright crimson mushrooms were growing in the corners—poisonous, of course, but perfectly edible if they were well roasted. However, the thought of food immediately evaporated when Maxim spotted someone’s bones, jumbled together with faded, tattered rags, lying in the semi-darkness by the wall. That gave him a bad feeling, and he turned around, walked down the ruined steps, folded his hands together into a megaphone, and yelled into the forest at the top of his voice, “Ohoho, you six-toed folks!” The echo almost immediately got stuck in the mist between the trees, and no one responded, except that some little birds or other started angrily and excitedly chattering above his head.

Maxim went back to the campfire, flung a few branches into the flames, and glanced into the pot. The concoction was boiling. He looked around, found something that looked like a spoon, sniffed at it, wiped it on the grass, and sniffed at it again. Then he carefully skimmed the gray scum off the concoction and shook it off the spoon onto the charred wood. He stirred the concoction, scooped up some of it from the edge, blew on it, then puckered up his lips, and tried it. It wasn’t bad at all, something like tahorg liver broth. Then he looked around again and said in a loud voice, “Breakfast is ready!” He couldn’t shake the feeling that his hosts were somewhere close by, but all he could see were motionless bushes, wet from the mist, and the black, gnarled trunks of trees, and all he could hear was the crackling of the campfire and the fussy chattering of the birds.

“Well, OK,” he said out loud. “Suit yourselves, but I’m initiating contact.”

He very quickly started enjoying the taste of it. Maybe the spoon was too big, or maybe his primeval instincts simply got the better of him, but he had lapped up a third of the pot before he even knew it. He regretfully moved a little distance away and sat there for a while, focusing on his gustatory sensations and giving the spoon another thorough wiping, but he couldn’t resist it after all and took another scoop, from the very bottom, of those little, tasty, melt-in-your-mouth brown slices that were like sea cucumber. Then he moved well away, wiped the spoon yet again, and set it across the top of the pot. This was just the right time to appease his feeling of gratitude.

He jumped to his feet, selected several slim sticks, and went into the building. Stepping cautiously across the rotten floorboards and trying not to look over at the human remains in the shade, he started picking mushrooms and threading them on a stick, choosing the very firmest caps. If I could just salt you a bit, he thought, and add a bit of pepper too—but never mind, for first contact this will do anyway. We’ll hang you over the fire, and all your active organic compounds will be dissipated as steam, and you’ll be a delicious treat. You’ll be my first contribution to the culture of this inhabited island, and the second one will be positron emitters. Suddenly it became a bit darker in the building, and he immediately sensed someone watching him. He managed to suppress his urge to abruptly swing around, counted to ten, slowly got up, and, smiling in advance, unhurriedly turned his head.

Looking in at him through the window was a long, dark face with large, despondent eyes and a mouth with its corners despondently turned down. It was looking at him without the slightest interest, with neither malice nor joy, as if it were looking not at a man from a different world but at some tedious domesticated animal that had once again clambered in where it had been told not to go. They looked at each other for several seconds, and Maxim could feel the despondency radiating from that face flood the building, sweep across the forest, across the entire planet and the universe surrounding it, and everything on all sides turned gray, despondent, and dismal. Everything had already happened, it had all happened many times over, and it would happen many more times, and there was no foreseeable salvation from this gray, despondent, dismal tedium. And then it became even darker in the building, and Maxim turned toward the door.

Standing there with his short, sturdy legs planted wide apart, and completely blocking the doorway with his broad shoulders, was a stocky man entirely covered with ginger hair and wearing a dreadful check coverall. Gazing at Maxim out of the riotous ginger thickets of his face were two gimlet-sharp blue eyes, very intent and very hostile, and yet somehow seeming equally jolly—perhaps by contrast with the universal despondency emanating from the window. This hairy roughneck had obviously also seen visitors from other worlds before, but he was used to dealing with these tiresome visitors abruptly, drastically, and decisively—without any contact-making or other such unnecessary complications. Hanging from a leather strap around his neck he had an extremely ominous-looking thick metal pipe, and with his firm, filthy hand he was pointing the outlet of this instrument for lynching alien visitors directly at Maxim’s belly. It was immediately obvious that he had never even heard of the supreme value of human life. Or of the Declaration of Human Rights, or any other such magnificent achievements of progressive humanism, and if you told him about any of these things, he simply wouldn’t believe you.

However, Maxim didn’t have to make that choice. He held the stick with mushroom caps threaded on it out in front of him, smiled even more broadly, and enunciated with exaggerated clarity, “Peace! Friendship!” The despondent individual outside the window responded to this slogan with a long, unintelligible phrase, after which he withdrew from the zone of contact and, to judge from the sounds outside, set about heaping dry branches onto the campfire. The blue-eyed man’s tousled ginger beard started moving, and growling, roaring, clanging sounds came darting out of that dense copper growth, instantly reminding Maxim of the iron dragon at the intersection. “Yes!” said Maxim, energetically nodding. “Earth! The cosmos!” He jabbed his thin stick up toward the zenith, and the ginger-bearded man obediently glanced at the smashed-in ceiling. “Maxim!” continued Maxim, prodding himself in the chest, “Mak-sim! My name is Maxim.” For additional cogency, he struck himself on the chest, like an enraged gorilla: “Maxim!”

“Mahh-ssim!” the ginger-bearded man barked with a strange accent. Keeping his eyes fixed on Maxim, he launched over his shoulder a series of rumbling and clanging sounds, in which the word “Mah-sim” was repeated several times, and to which the invisible, despondent individual responded by uttering a sequence of sinister, dismal phonemes. The ginger-bearded man’s blue eyes started rolling about, his yellow-toothed mouth opened wide, and he howled with laughter. When he was done laughing, the ginger-bearded man wiped his eyes with his free hand, lowered his death-dealing weapon, and unambiguously gestured to Maxim: All right, come on out!

Maxim gladly obeyed. He walked out onto the steps and proffered the stick with the mushrooms on it to the ginger-bearded man once again. The ginger-bearded man took the stick, turned it this way and that way, sniffed at it, and flung it aside.

“Hey, no!” Maxim protested. “Those will have you begging for more…”

He bent down and picked up the stick. The ginger-bearded man didn’t object. He slapped Maxim on the back and pushed him toward the fire. Beside the fire he heaved down on Maxim’s shoulder, making him sit, and started trying to din something into his head. But Maxim didn’t listen. He was watching the despondent individual, who sat facing Maxim, drying some kind of broad, dirty rag in front of the fire. One of his feet was bare, and he kept wiggling the toes. And there were five of those toes—five, not six.

2

Gai was sitting on the edge of the bench by the window, polishing the badge on his beret with his cuff and watching Corporal Varibobu write out his travel order. The corporal’s head was inclined to one side and his eyes were goggling out of it; his left hand was resting on the desk, holding down a form with a red border, and his right hand was unhurriedly tracing out calligraphic letters. It’s great the way he does that, thought Gai, not without a certain envy. The inky-fingered old buzzard, twenty years in the Guards and still a pen pusher. Just look at him glaring, the pride of the brigade—any moment now he’ll stick his tongue out… There, he’s done it. Even his tongue is all inky. Bless you, Varibobu, you cracked old inkwell. We’ll never meet again. And in general it’s a sad business, this leaving—we got a fine set of men together, and real gentlemen officers too, and it’s useful service, meaningful… Gai sniffed and looked out the window.

Outside the wind was blowing white dust along the wide, smooth street without sidewalks, paved with old hexagonal slabs. The walls of the identical long administrative and engineering staff buildings were glowing white, and Madam Idoya, a portly and imposing lady, was walking along, shielding her face against the dust and holding up her skirt—a brave woman, she hadn’t been afraid to bring her children and follow the brigadier to these dangerous parts. The sentry outside garrison HQ, one of the rookies, wearing a new duster that was still rigid and a beret pulled right down over his ears, gave her the “present arms” salute. Then two trucks carrying educatees drove past, no doubt taking them for vaccination… That’s right, give it to him, get him in the neck. He shouldn’t go sticking his head over the side, he’s got no business doing that here, this isn’t some kind of public thoroughfare.

“Exactly how is your name written?” Varibobu asked. “‘G-a-a-l’? Or can I simply write ‘G-a-l’?”

“No way,” said Gai. “My surname is Gaal. G-a-a-l.”

“That’s a shame,” said Varibobu, pensively sucking on his pen. “If I could write ‘G-a-l,’ it would just fit on the line.”

Write it, write it, inkpot, thought Gai. Forget the nonsense about saving lines. And they call you a corporal… Buttons all covered with green tarnish. Some corporal you are. Two medals, but you never even learned to shoot straight, everybody knows that…

The door abruptly swung open and Cornet To’ot briskly strode in, wearing the duty officer’s gold armband. Gai jumped to his feet and clicked his heels. The corporal lifted his backside slightly but didn’t stop writing, the old fogy. Call him a corporal…

“Aha,” said the cornet, tearing off his dust mask in disgust. “Private Gaal. I know, I know, you’re leaving us. A shame. But I’m glad for you. I hope you’ll continue to serve with equal fervor in the capital.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Cornet, sir!” Gai said with true feeling. The exaltation even set his nose itching on the inside. He was very fond of Mr. Cornet To’ot, a cultured officer and a former high school teacher. And apparently the cornet appreciated his qualities too.

“You may be seated,” said the cornet, walking in past the barrier to his own desk. Without bothering to sit down, he took a cursory glance at his documents and picked up the phone. Gai tactfully turned away toward the window.

Outside in the street nothing had changed. His own beloved squad tramped past in formation on the way to lunch. Gai watched them go with a sad air. Now they would reach the canteen, and Corporal Serembesh would give the command to remove their berets for the Word of Thanksgiving, the guys would roar out the Word of Thanksgiving with all their thirty throats—and meanwhile the steam is already rising above the cooking pots, and the bowls are gleaming, and good old Doga is all set to deliver that hoary old gag of his about the private and the cook… Really and truly, it was a shame to leave. Serving here was dangerous, and the climate was unhealthy, and the rations were really monotonous—nothing but canned stuff—but even so. Here, at least, you knew for certain that you were needed, that they couldn’t manage without you. Here you faced that pernicious pressure from the South full on, taking it on the chest, and you really felt that pressure. Gai had buried so many of his friends here—over on the other side of the settlement there was an entire grove of poles with rusty helmets on them…

On the other hand, he was going to the capital. They wouldn’t send just anyone there, and if they were sending him, it wasn’t for a vacation… They said that from the Palace of the Fathers you could see all the Guards’ parade grounds, so there was certain to be one of the Fathers observing every formation. Well, it wasn’t an absolute certainty, but he might take a look every once in a while. Gai felt a sudden, feverish flush; completely out of the blue, he imagined himself being been called out of formation, and on his second stride he slipped and crashed down, flat on his face, at the commanding officer’s feet, his automatic rifle clattering on the cobblestones, gaping open, and his beret wildly flying off into the air… He took a deep breath and stealthily looked around. God forbid… Yes. The capital. Nothing escaped their eyes. Well, never mind—after all, there were other men serving. And Rada, his dear sister… and his funny uncle with his ancient bones and primeval skulls. Oh, I miss you so badly, all my dearest ones!

He glanced out the window again and opened his mouth in bewilderment. Two men were walking along the street toward the garrison HQ. One of them was familiar: that ginger roughneck Zef, one of the especially dangerous educatees, the master sergeant of the 134th Sappers’ Unit, a condemned man who earned his life by keeping the roads clear. But the other man—well, he was some kind of bogeyman, and a creepy kind of bogeyman at that. At first Gai took him for a degenerate, but then he realized that Zef wouldn’t be likely to drag a degenerate into garrison HQ. He was a really husky young guy, brown all over, as strong as an ox, and naked: all he had on was a short pair of some kind of underpants made out of some shiny material. Zef had his gun with him, but it didn’t look like he was escorting this stranger; they were walking side by side, and the stranger kept trying to make Zef understand something, extravagantly waving his arms around all the time. But Zef was just letting him rattle on, and he had a totally bemused look on his face. He’s some kind of savage, thought Gai. Only what was he doing out there on the highway? Maybe he was raised by bears? There have been cases like that. And he fits the part all right—just look at those muscles and the way they ripple.

He watched as the two men walked up to the sentry, and Zef, wiping away his sweat, started trying to explain something. But the sentry was a rookie; he didn’t know Zef, and he prodded him under the ribs with his automatic, obviously telling him to move back to the regulation distance. Seeing this, the naked young guy got involved in the conversation. His hands flew backward and forward through the air, and his face was really strange now; Gai couldn’t understand his expression at all. It was like mercury, and the man’s eyes were dark, and they were shifting about rapidly… That was it—now the sentry was totally confused too. Now he would raise the alarm. Gai turned around.

“Mr. Cornet,” he said, “permission to speak? The sergeant of the 134th Unit has brought someone in. Will you take a look?”

The cornet walked over to the window, took a look, and his eyebrows shot up. He pushed the window frame open, stuck his head out, and shouted, choking on the dust that came pouring in. “Sentry! Let them pass!”

Gai was just closing the window when there was a tramping of feet in the corridor and Zef edged into the office with his bizarre companion in tow. Tumbling in behind them, and jostling them on, came the officer of the guard and another two guys from the duty watch. Zef stood at attention, cleared his throat, fixed the cornet with his brazen blue eyes, and wheezed, “Master sergeant of the 134th Unit, educatee Zef, begs leave to report. This man here was detained on the highway. All the signs indicate that he is insane, Mr. Cornet: he eats poisonous mushrooms, doesn’t understand a word that is spoken to him, speaks in an incomprehensible fashion, and goes around, as you might be pleased to observe, naked.”

While Zef was reporting, the detainee ran his agile eyes around the room, smiling at everyone there in a strange, sinister manner—his teeth were even and as white as sugar. The cornet clasped his hands behind his back, moved closer, and looked the man over from head to foot. “Who are you?” he asked.

The detainee smiled in an even more sinister manner, slapped his open hand on his chest and uttered something unintelligible; it sounded like “mah-sim.” The officer of the guard guffawed, the sentries started giggling, and the cornet smiled too. Gai didn’t immediately get the joke but then he remembered that in thieves’ slang “mah-sim” meant “knife-eater.”

“Apparently he is one of your company,” the cornet remarked to Zef.

Zef shook his head, scattering a cloud of dust out of his beard. “Absolutely not,” he said. “‘Mah-sim’ is what he calls himself, but he doesn’t understand thieves’ argot at all. So he isn’t one of ours.”

“A degenerate, probably,” the officer of the guard suggested, and the cornet gave him an icy look. “Naked,” the officer of the guard ardently explained, backing away toward the door. “Permission to carry on, Mr. Cornet?” he barked.

“Go,” said the cornet. “And send someone to get the headquarters medical officer, Mr. Zogu. Where did you catch him?” he asked Zef.

Zef reported that the previous night he and his unit had been combing quadrant 23/07. They had destroyed four self-propelled devices and one automated device, purpose unknown, losing two men in the explosion, and everything was in order. At about seven in the morning, this unknown individual had approached Zef’s campfire from out of the forest. They had spotted him from a distance and followed him, concealing themselves in the bushes, and then chosen a convenient moment to detain him. At first Zef had taken him for a fugitive, then decided that he wasn’t a fugitive but a degenerate, and was on the point of shooting him, but had changed his mind because this man… At this point Zef jutted out his beard, at a loss for words, and concluded, “Because it became clear to me that he wasn’t a degenerate.”

“From what did that become clear to you?” the cornet asked. The detainee just stood there motionless, his arms folded across his powerful chest, glancing at the cornet and Zef by turns.

Zef said it would be hard for him to explain. In the first place, this man hadn’t been afraid of anything, and he still wasn’t. And in addition, he had taken the soup off the fire and eaten precisely a third of it, exactly as a comrade was supposed to do, and before that he had shouted into the forest, evidently calling to Zef’s men, sensing that they were somewhere nearby. And furthermore, he had tried to feed them mushrooms. The mushrooms were poisonous, and they didn’t eat them or let him eat them, but he had obviously felt an urge to give them some kind of a treat, clearly as a sign of gratitude. And furthermore, everyone knew that no degenerate possesses physical abilities that exceed those of an average, frail person. But on the way here, this man had worn Zef out as if Zef were a little kid, strolling through patches of underbrush and fallen trees as if they were flat ground, jumping across ditches, and then waiting for Zef on the other side. And also, for some reason—maybe out of sheer bravado?—he had sometimes taken Zef in his arms and run two or three hundred strides with him like that.

The cornet adopted a pose of intense concentration while listening to Zef, but the moment Zef stopped speaking, he abruptly turned to the detainee and barked point-blank at him in Hontian, “Your name? Rank? Assignment?”

Gai was delighted by the adroitness of the move, but the detainee clearly didn’t understand Hontian either. He bared his magnificent teeth again, slapped himself on the chest, and said “Mah-sim,” then jabbed his finger into the educatee’s side and said “Zef,” and after that he started talking—slowly, with long pauses, pointing up at the ceiling or down at the floor, or running his hands through the air around himself. Gai thought that he picked up several familiar words in this speech, but those words had nothing at all to do with the matter at hand, or with each other. “Bedstead,” the detainee said, and then “Hurly-burly, hurly-burly… Squirm…”

When he fell silent, Corporal Varibobu piped up. “I think he’s a cunning spy,” the old inkpot declared. “We should report him to the brigadier.”

However, the cornet took no notice of him. “You may go, Zef,” he said. “You have demonstrated zeal, and that will be credited to your account.”

“Most obliged to you, Mr. Cornet,” Zef barked, and he had already turned to go when suddenly the detainee gave a quiet whoop, leaned over the barrier, and grabbed the bundle of blank forms lying on the desk in front of the corporal. The old fogy was frightened to death (how about that for a guardsman!), and he recoiled, flinging his pen at the savage. The savage deftly caught the pen in midair, propped himself against the barrier where he was standing, and started sketching something on a form, taking no notice of Gai or Zef, who had grabbed hold of his sides.

“As you were!” the cornet ordered, and Gai willingly obeyed; holding this brown bear was just like trying to stop a tank by grabbing hold of its caterpillar tread. The cornet and Zef stood on each side of the detainee and looked at what he was scribbling.

“I think it’s a diagram of the World,” Zef said uncertainly.

“Hmm…” the cornet responded.

“But of course! There in the center is the World Light, and this here is the World… And as he understands things, we are here.”

“But why is it all flat?” the cornet skeptically asked.

Zef shrugged. “Perhaps it’s a child’s perception. Infantilism… Look here, see? This is how he shows the way he got here.”

“Yes, possibly. I’ve heard about that kind of insanity.”

Gai finally managed to squeeze between the firm, smooth shoulder of the detainee and Zef’s prickly ginger thickets. He thought the drawing he saw was funny. It was how schoolchildren in the first grade represented the World: a little circle at the center, signifying the World Light, a large circle around it, signifying the Sphere of the World, and on its circumference, a thick black dot. You only had to add little arms and legs to it and you had “This is the World, and this is me.” The unfortunate freak hadn’t even shown the circumference of the World correctly, he’d drawn some sort of oval. Well, he clearly was deranged… And he’d also drawn a dotted line leading from under the ground to that dot, as if to say, Look, that’s how I got here!

Meanwhile the detainee took another form and rapidly sketched two little Spheres of the World in opposite corners, joined them together with a dotted line, and then drew in some kind of squiggles. Zef whistled hopelessly and asked the cornet, “Permission to retire?”

But the cornet didn’t let him go. “Uhhh… Zef,” he said. “As I recall, you used to be active in the area of… uh…” He tapped a bent finger against his temple.

“Yes, sir,” Zef replied after a pause.

The cornet started striding around the office. “Could you not perhaps… uhhh… how can I put it… formulate your opinion concerning the individual in question? Professionally, if I might express myself in that way.”

“I couldn’t really say,” said Zef. “Under the terms of my sentence, I have no right to act in a professional capacity.”

“I understand,” said the cornet. “That’s quite correct. I commend you. Buuut…”

Zef stood there at attention, with his blue eyes open wide. But the cornet was clearly experiencing a certain degree of discomfiture. Gai understood him very well. This was an important incident, of national significance. (What if this savage turned out to be a spy after all?) And HQ medical officer Zogu was a fine guardsman, of course, a brilliant guardsman, but he was only the HQ medical officer. Whereas the ginger roughneck Zef, before he became involved in criminal activities, had been very good at his job and was actually a great celebrity. But it was possible to understand him too. For, after all, everyone, even a criminal, even a criminal who has acknowledged his crime, wants to live. And the law was ruthless with regard to those already condemned to death: the slightest violation meant execution. On the spot. It was the only way; in times like these, leniency turned out to be cruelty and the only true leniency lay in cruelty. The law was ruthless but wise.

“Well then,” said the cornet. “There’s nothing to be done… But, speaking strictly personally—do you really think he’s insane?”

Zef hesitated again. “Speaking strictly personally?” he repeated. “Well, of course, in speaking strictly personally, a man is inherently inclined to make mistakes… Well then, speaking strictly personally, I am inclined to regard this as a clear case of dissociated personality, with displacement and replacement of the genuine ego by an imaginary one. And, speaking strictly personally, on the basis of my own experience of life, I would recommend electroshock and phleoferous medication.”

Corporal Varibobu stealthily noted all of this down, but the cornet couldn’t be fooled that easily. He took the sheet of paper with the notes from the corporal and stuck it in the pocket of his field jacket. Mah-sim started talking again, addressing the cornet and Zef by turns—there was something he wanted, the poor fellow, something that he thought wasn’t right—but at that point the door opened and the HQ medical officer walked in, apparently having been torn away from his lunch.

“Greetings, To’ot,” he sullenly declared. “What’s the problem? I see that you are alive and well, and that is some comfort to me. But who is this character?”

“The educatees caught him in the forest,” the cornet explained. “I suspect that he’s insane.”

“He’s a malingerer, not a madman,” the medical officer growled, pouring himself a glass of water from the carafe. “Send him back into the forest and let him work.”

“He’s not one of ours,” the cornet objected. “And we don’t know where he came from. I think the degenerates must have captured him at some time; he went crazy while he was with them and defected to us.”

“That’s right,” the medic growled. “You’d have to be crazy to defect to us.” He walked over to the detainee and immediately reached out to grab hold of his eyelids. The detainee gave a spine-chilling grin and gently pushed him away. “Hey, hey!” said the medical officer, deftly grabbing hold of his ear. “You just stand still, my fine stallion!”

The detainee yielded. The medic turned back his eyelids, palpated his neck and throat while whistling to himself, bent the detainee’s arms and straightened them out again, leaned down and struck him below the knees, then went back to the carafe and drank another glass of water.

“Heartburn,” he announced.

Gai looked at Zef. The ginger-bearded man was standing off to one side, with his gun set beside his legs, gazing at the wall with emphatic indifference. The medical officer drank his fill and went back to the freak. He felt him and tapped him all over, looked at his teeth, punched him twice in the stomach, and then took a little flat box out of his pocket, unwound a wire, plugged it into a socket, and started applying the little box to various parts of the savage’s body.

“Right,” he said, coiling up the wire. “And he’s mute too, is he?”

“No,” said the cornet. “He talks, but in some kind of bear’s language. He only uses our words sometimes, and even then they’re distorted. He doesn’t understand us. And these are his drawings.”

The HQ medic looked at the drawings. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Amusing.” He grabbed the corporal’s pen and rapidly drew a cat on one of the forms, the way that children draw cats, all sticks and circles. “What do you say to this, my friend?” he asked, handing the drawing to the freak.

Without pondering for even a second, the freak started scratching away with the pen, and a strange animal, with a thick coat of fur and a heavy, menacing look in its eyes, appeared beside the cat. Gai didn’t know any animal like that, but he did understand one thing: this was nothing like a child’s drawing. It was drawn really well—quite wonderfully, in fact. Just to look at it was frightening. The medical officer reached out his hand for the pen, but the freak moved back and drew a different animal, a totally bizarre one, with huge ears, wrinkly skin, and a thick tail instead of a nose.

“Wonderful!” the medic exclaimed, slapping his sides.

However, the freak didn’t stop at that. And what he went on to draw wasn’t an animal but clearly some kind of machine—it looked like a large, transparent shell. He deftly drew in a little figure sitting inside the shell, tapped his finger on the figure, then tapped himself on the chest with the same finger, and said, “Mah-ssim.”

“He could have seen that thing by the river,” said Zef, who had walked up without being heard. “We burned something like that last night. But those monsters…” he shook his head.

The medical officer seemed to notice him for the first time. “Ah, professor!” he exclaimed with exaggerated delight. “So that’s it, I thought there was an odd stink in the office! Would you be so kind, dear colleague, as to pronounce your wise judgments from that corner over there? You would greatly oblige me…”

Varibobu giggled, and the cornet said in a severe voice, “Stand by the doors, Zef, and don’t forget yourself.”

“Well, all right,” the medic said. “What are you thinking of doing with him, To’ot?”

“That depends on your diagnosis, Zogu,” the cornet replied. “If he’s a malingerer, I’ll hand him over to the prosecutor’s office, and they’ll get to the bottom of things. But if he’s a madman—”

“He’s not a malingerer, To’ot,” the HQ medical officer said emphatically. “The prosecutor’s office is definitely not the place for him. But I know a place where they will be interested in him. Where’s the brigadier?”

“The brigadier is out on the highway.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter anyway. You’re the duty officer, aren’t you, To’ot? So you just dispatch this extremely curious individual to this address…” The medic propped himself against the barrier, shielding himself from everyone with his shoulders and elbows, and wrote something on the back of the last drawing.

“But what is this?” the cornet asked.

“This? It’s a certain department that will be grateful to you for your freak, To’ot. I warrant you that.”

The cornet uncertainly twirled the form in his hands, then walked over to the farthest corner of the office and beckoned the medic with his finger. They talked there for a while in low voices, so that only isolated phrases spoken by Mr. Zogu could be made out: “…The Department of Propaganda… Send him with a man you can trust… It’s not so very secret!… I warrant you… Order him to forget the matter… Damn it, why, a snot-nosed kid won’t understand anything anyway!…”

“All right,” the cornet said eventually. “Write a cover letter, Corporal Varibobu!”

The corporal lifted his backside off his seat a little.

“Is the travel order for Guards private Gaal ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Add prisoner under escort Mah-sim to the travel order. He is to be escorted without handcuffs and is permitted to travel in a public car… Private Gaal!”

Gai clicked his heels and drew himself erect. “At your command, Mr. Cornet!”

“Before presenting yourself at your new duty station in our capital city, deliver the detainee to the address indicated on this sheet of paper. After discharging these instructions, hand the note to the duty officer at your new station. Forget the address. This is your final assignment, Gaal, and you will of course carry it out as befits a fine young guardsman.”

“Your word is my command!” Gai shouted in a rush of indescribable rapture. A surge of joy, pride, and happiness, a hot wave of ravishing devotion, swept over him, lifting him up and bearing him onward toward the heavens. Oh, these sweet moments of ecstasy, these unforgettable moments, these moments that shook him to the core of his being, these moments when he sprouted wings, these moments of sweet contempt for everything coarse, material, and corporeal… These moments when he thirsted for the fire and the command, when he yearned for the command that would unite him with the fire, hurl him into the fire, against a thousand enemies, against gaping gun muzzles, against millions of bullets… and that was still not all, it would be even sweeter still, the ecstasy would blind and consume… Oh, the fire! Oh, the glory! The command, the command! And there it is, there it is!… He gets to his feet, this fine, strapping, handsome fellow, the pride of the brigade, our Corporal Varibobu, like a flaming torch, like a statue of glory and loyalty, and he starts singing, and we all take up the refrain, every one of us:

And they all sang. The brilliant Cornet To’ot sang, that very model of a Guards officer, for whom Gai wanted so badly, at this very instant, to lay down his life, his soul, and everything, to the strains of this very march. And the HQ medical officer Zogu sang, the very model of a brother of mercy, as coarse as a genuine soldier and as gentle as a mother’s hands. And our Corporal Varibobu, ours to the very marrow of his bones, an old war dog, a veteran turned gray haired in battle. Oh, how the battle medals glitter on his distinguished threadbare tunic; for him there is nothing else but service, nothing apart from devotion.

Do you know us, our Unknown Fathers? Raise your weary heads and look on us, for after all you see everything, and then surely you must see that we are here, on the distant, barbarous outskirts of our country. We will die in rapture and in torment for the happiness of our motherland!

But what is this? He isn’t singing, he’s just standing there, with his legs sprawling, leaning against the barrier, and turning his idiotic brown head to and fro, with his eyes darting around, and he keeps grinning, he keeps baring his teeth… Who is that blackguard grinning at? Oh, how I’d love to walk up to him, uttering a fearsome cry, and take a swing with my guardsman’s fist at that abominable white grin… But I mustn’t, I mustn’t, that’s not the Guards’ way. He is only a poor freak, a pitiful invalid, true happiness is unachievable to him, he is a blind nonentity, a pitiful fragment of humanity…

But this ginger-haired bastard, doubled over in the corner in agonizing pain… Ah no, that’s a different matter: You always get headaches when we labor for breath in our rapture, when we sing our battle march and are prepared to rupture our lungs in order to sing it through to the end! You lousy educatee, you hideous criminal, you ginger bandit, I’ll grab you by your chest and by your foul beard! Get up, you bastard! Stand to attention when guardsmen are singing their march! And I’ll smash you across your head, across your head, across your filthy mug, across your insolent, goggling eyes… Take that, and that…

Gai flung the educatee away, clicked his heels, and turned toward the cornet. As always after a fit of rapturous exhilaration, he felt a ringing in his ears, and the world was sweetly drifting and swaying in front of his eyes.

Corporal Varibobu, blue from the strain, was feebly clearing his throat. The HQ medical officer, sweaty and crimson, was voraciously drinking water straight from the carafe and tugging a handkerchief out of his pocket. The cornet was scowling with a vacant expression, as if he was trying to remember something. By the door, ginger-haired Zef was squirming about in a dirty heap of check rags. His face was smashed and bloody, and he was feebly groaning through his teeth. And Mah-sim wasn’t smiling any longer. His face had frozen, becoming entirely like an ordinary human face, and he was gazing round-eyed at Gai, with his mouth hanging open.

“Private Gaal,” the cornet said in a cracked voice. “Uhhh… I wanted to say something to you… or have I already said it?… Wait, Zogu, leave me at least a sip of water, will you…”

3

Maxim woke up feeling sluggish and heavy headed. The room was stifling; the window had been closed at night again. But then, opening the window didn’t make much difference. The city was too close; during the day he could see its motionless, reddish-brown cap of repulsive fumes, which the wind carried this way, and neither the distance nor the height of his room on the fifth floor nor the park down below were any help. What I could do with right now is an ion shower, thought Maxim, and then dart out naked into the garden—not this lousy, half-rotted garden, all gray from the fumes, but our garden, somewhere outside Leningrad, on the Karelian Isthmus—and then run about nine miles around the lake at full speed, and swim across the lake, and then walk along the bottom of it for about twenty minutes to exercise my lungs a bit, clambering over the slippery underwater boulders.

He jumped up, swung the window open, stuck his head out under the fine drizzle, took a deep breath of the damp air, and started coughing—the air was full of all sorts of stuff that shouldn’t be there, and the raindrops left a metallic aftertaste on his tongue. Cars hissed and whistled as they hurtled along the express highway. Down below the window, wet foliage glistened and broken glass glimmered on top of a high stone wall. A man in a wet cape was walking around in the park, scraping fallen leaves together into a heap. Through the pall of rain Maxim could vaguely make out the brick building of some kind of factory on the outskirts of the city. As always, thick streams of poisonous smoke were slowly creeping out of its two tall chimneys and drooping back down toward the ground.

A stifling world. A troubled, sickly world. It’s absolutely dreary and unappealing, like that official building where the men with the bright buttons and bad teeth suddenly, completely out of the blue, started howling, straining their voices until they went hoarse, Gai, that likable, handsome young fellow, started beating that red-bearded Zef’s face to a bloody pulp, and Zef didn’t even try to resist. A troubled world… A radioactive river, an absurd iron dragon, polluted air, and disheveled passengers in a lumbering, three-story metal box on wheels that pours out bluish-gray carbon monoxide fumes. And another savage scene—in that very same passenger car—when those coarse men, who smelled of poorly refined alcohol for some reason, reduced an elderly woman to tears with their crude laughter and gestures, and no one stuck up for her; the car was absolutely jam-packed, but everyone looked the other way. Only Gai jumped to his feet, pale-faced with fury, or perhaps fear, and shouted something at them, and they cleared off… An awful lot of fury, an awful lot of fear, an awful lot of resentment.

Everyone here is resentful and repressed—either resentful or repressed. Gai is obviously a good-natured, likable kind of person, but sometimes he would suddenly fly into an inexplicable rage and start frenziedly quarreling with the people beside him in the car, and giving me surly looks, and then just as suddenly he would relapse into a profound stupor. And nobody else in the car behaved any better. They sat or lay there perfectly peacefully for hours, talking quietly, even smiling and quietly laughing, and then suddenly someone would start cantankerously griping at the person next to him, and the other person would nervously snap back, and instead of trying to calm them down, the people around them got sucked into the quarrel, and the fracas expanded until it engulfed the entire car, and then everybody was yelling at everybody else, threatening and jostling, and somebody was reaching over somebody else’s head, waving his fists about, and somebody was grabbed by the collar, children were wailing at the tops of their voices, and somebody angrily tweaked their ears, and then everybody gradually quieted down, and they were all surly with each other, reluctant to talk, turning their faces away…

But sometimes the ruckus turned into something absolutely outrageous, with people’s eyes goggling out of their heads, their faces breaking out in red blotches, and their voices raised to bloodcurdling shrieks, while some roared with laughter, some sang, and some prayed, raising their trembling hands above their heads. An insane asylum… And those cheerless, melancholy gray fields drifting by outside the windows, stations blackened with smoke, squalid villages, ruins of some kind that hadn’t been cleared away, and gaunt, ragged women watching the train go by with their hollow, dismal eyes…

Maxim moved back from the window, limply stood in the middle of the cramped little room for a while with a feeling of apathy and mental exhaustion, then forced himself to gather his strength and limber up a bit, using the unwieldy wooden table as his apparatus. It won’t take long before I get completely out of shape like this, he anxiously thought. I can probably cope with another day or two, but then I’ll have to hit the road and roam around in the forest for a while… It would be good to head for the mountains—the mountains they have here look glorious, really wild. It’s a fairly long distance, of course; I couldn’t do it in one night… What was it that Gai called them? “Zartak.” I wonder if that’s their name or just mountains in general. But anyway, the mountains are out of the question. Not on my agenda. I’ve been here for ten days already, and nothing has been done yet…

He squeezed into the shower stall and spent several minutes snorting and rubbing himself down under the heavy artificial rain, which was every bit as repulsive as the genuine kind. It was a little bit colder, but the water was hard and limy, and what was more, it had been chlorinated, and it had also been run through metal pipes.

He wiped himself off with a disinfected towel, and then, feeling dissatisfied with everything—this murky morning, and this suffocating world, and his own idiotic situation, and the fatty breakfast that he would have to eat now—he went back into the room in order to make up the bed, an ugly contraption of iron bars with a greasy, striped pancake of a mattress under the clean sheet.

His breakfast had already been brought in and it was steaming and stinking on the table. Fish was closing the window again.

“Hello,” Maxim said to her in the local language. “Mustn’t. Window.”

“Hello,” she replied, clicking the numerous bolts shut. “Must. Rain. Bad.”

“Fish,” Maxim said in Russian. In fact her name was Nolu, but from the very beginning Maxim had dubbed her Fish—for the general expression of her face and her imperturbability.

She turned around and looked at him with unblinking eyes for a moment. For the umpteenth time, she set her finger to the tip of her nose and said “Woman,” then she prodded Maxim with her finger and said “Man,” and then she jabbed her finger in the direction of the loose coverall that he was so sick of, hanging on the back of a chair. “Clothes. Must!” For some reason she couldn’t bear to see a man in just his shorts. For some reason she needed a man to swaddle himself all the way from his feet right up to his neck.

He started getting dressed and she started making his bed, although Maxim always told her he would do that himself. She moved the table, which Maxim always set against the wall, back into the middle of the room, and resolutely turned the valve of the heating system, which Maxim always set as high as it would go, right back down low again, and Maxim’s monotonous repetitions of “Mustn’t” all shattered against her equally monotonous repetitions of “Must.”

After fastening the coverall at the neck with its single broken button, Maxim went over to the table and prodded at his breakfast with a two-pronged fork. The usual dialogue ensued.

“I don’t want. Mustn’t.”

“Must. Food. Breakfast.”

“I don’t want. Tastes bad.”

“Must. Breakfast. Tastes good.”

“Fish,” Maxim said to her with sincere feeling, “you’re a cruel person. If you ended up with me on Earth, I’d run myself ragged in order to find you food that you liked.”

“I don’t understand,” she regretfully said. “What is ‘fish’?”

As he queasily chewed on a fatty morsel, Maxim took a piece of paper and drew a bream, viewed head-on. She carefully studied the drawing and put it in the pocket of her robe. She collected all the drawings that Maxim made and carried them off somewhere. Maxim drew a lot, and quite voluntarily. He enjoyed it; during his free time and at night when he couldn’t sleep, there was absolutely nothing to do here. He drew animals and people, traced out tables and diagrams, and reproduced anatomical cross sections. He drew Professor Megu, looking like a hippopotamus, and a hippopotamus looking like Professor Megu. He set out the universal tables of Lincos, Freudenthal’s invented language, and plans of machines, and diagrams of historical sequences; he used up masses of paper, and it all disappeared into Fish’s pocket, but without any apparent consequences for the process of contact. Professor Megu, a.k.a. Hippopotamus, had his own method, and he had no intention of departing from it.

Hippopotamus had taken absolutely no interest in the Lincos universal table, the study of which was supposed to be the starting point for any first contact. Fish was the only one who taught the new arrival the local language, and she only did that in order to make it easier to deal with him, so that he would close the window and not walk around without his coverall. No experts in first contact were involved at all. Maxim was handled by Hippopotamus and only Hippopotamus.

However, Hippopotamus did have at his disposal a rather powerful research tool—mentoscopic technology—and Maxim spent from fourteen to sixteen hours a day in the scanning chair. Moreover, Hippopotamus’s mentoscope was a good one; it allowed him to penetrate rather deeply into a subject’s memories, and it had extremely high-resolution capability. Possessing a machine like this, it might perhaps have been possible to manage without any knowledge of language. But Hippopotamus used his mentoscope in a rather strange manner. He quite categorically, even rather indignantly, refused to display Maxim’s mentograms, and dealt with those mentograms in a quite extraordinary manner. Maxim had deliberately developed an entire program of memories that should have given the indigenous population here a fairly adequate impression of the social, economic, and cultural life of Earth. But mentograms of that kind entirely failed to rouse Hippopotamus’s enthusiasm. He contorted his features into a morose grimace, mumbled, walked away and started making telephone calls, or sat down at the desk and started tediously nagging his assistant, in the process frequently repeating the succulent little word “massaraksh.” But when the screen showed Maxim blowing up an immense ice boulder that had pinned down his ship, or blasting an armored wolf to shreds with his scorcher, or recapturing an express laboratory from a gigantic, stupid pseudo-octopus, it was literally quite impossible to drag Hippopotamus away from the mentoscope, even by the ears. He quietly squealed, gleefully slapped his hands on his bald patch, and menacingly yelled at his exhausted assistant, who was keeping an eye on the recording of the images. The spectacle of a chromospheric prominence threw the professor into raptures as intense as if he had never seen anything of the kind in his life, and he really enjoyed the love scenes, which Maxim had mostly borrowed from movies, in order to give the indigenous population here some impression of the emotional life of humankind.

This absurd attitude to the material reduced Maxim to cheerless speculation; it gave him the impression that Hippopotamus was not a professor at all but merely a mentoscope operator, preparing material for the genuine contact commission, whom Maxim still had to meet, and when that would happen remained unknown. Which meant Hippopotamus was a rather primitive individual, like the little kid in War and Peace who was only interested in battle scenes. And that was galling. Maxim represented Earth, and—honestly and truly!—he really had every right to expect a more serious contact partner.

Of course, he could suppose that this world was situated on an intersection of certain unidentified interstellar highways, and that aliens were a common occurrence here. Such a common occurrence, in fact, that they no longer bothered to set up special, authoritative commissions for every new arrival but simply pumped the most impressive information out of him and left it at that. One argument in favor of such an assumption was the efficiency that had been demonstrated by the men with bright buttons, who were clearly not specialists, in coming to grips with the situation and dispatching the new arrival to the appropriate destination. Or perhaps some nonhumanoids who had been here earlier had left such bad memories behind them that now the local population regarded any alien visitor with categorical distrust, and in that case all the ballyhoo being kicked up over Professor Hippopotamus’s mentoscope was no more than a facade, a pretense at contact, a way of dragging things out until Maxim’s fate was decided by certain higher authorities.

One way or another, this is a total disaster for me, Maxim decided, gagging on his final piece of food. I have to learn the language as quickly as possible, and then everything will become clear.

“Good,” said Fish, taking away his plate. “We go.”

Maxim sighed and got up. They walked out into the corridor. It was a long, dirty-blue corridor, with long rows of closed doors, exactly like the door of Maxim’s room, on the right and the left. Maxim had never met anyone here, but on a couple of occasions he had heard strange, agitated voices from behind doors. Perhaps other aliens awaiting their fate were kept here too?

Fish walked in front with a broad, male stride, as straight as a ramrod, and Maxim suddenly felt very sorry for her. This country clearly still had no concept of the beauty industry, and poor Fish was left entirely to her own devices. With that sparse, colorless hair protruding from under her white cap, those huge shoulder blades bulging under her white coat, and those hideously skinny legs, it must be impossible to put a brave face on things—except perhaps with beings from other planets, and even then only with the nonhumanoids. The professor’s assistant treated her disdainfully, and Hippopotamus took absolutely no notice of her; the only thing he ever said to her was “Yyy,” which was probably his version of the intercosmic “Ehhh…” Recalling his own far-from-generous attitude toward her, Maxim felt a sudden pang of conscience. He hurried to catch up with her, stroked her bony shoulder, and said, “Nolu a fine girl. Good.”

She glanced up at him with her dry face, looking more than ever like a startled bream face-on. She removed his hand, knitted her almost invisible brows, and declared in a severe tone of voice, “Maxim not good. Man. Woman. Mustn’t.”

Feeling embarrassed, Maxim dropped back again, and they walked to the end of the corridor like that. Fish pushed open a door and they found themselves in the large, bright room that Maxim had dubbed the “reception area.” The windows here were tastelessly decorated with rectangular grilles of thick iron bars, and there was a tall, leather-upholstered door that led into Hippopotamus’s laboratory. And also, for some reason, there were always two strapping, rather slow-moving representatives of the local population who sat by that door, without responding to any greetings and appearing to be in a permanent state of trance.

As usual, Fish walked straight through into the laboratory, leaving Maxim in the reception area. As usual, Maxim said hello, and as usual, the men didn’t reply. The door into the laboratory was left slightly ajar, and Maxim could hear Hippopotamus’s irritated voice and the loud clicking of the activated mentoscope. He walked over to a window and looked out for a while at the misty, wet landscape and the forested plain, dissected by the express highway, and at a tall metal tower that was barely visible in the rain, but he quickly grew bored and walked into the laboratory without waiting to be asked.

Here, as usual, the air had a pleasant smell of ozone, the duplicate screens of the mentoscope were flickering, and the bald-headed, overworked assistant with a name that was impossible to remember and the new Russian nickname Floor Lamp was pretending to adjust the apparatus while in fact intently listening to the ruckus. Sitting in Hippopotamus’s chair at Hippopotamus’s desk was a stranger with a square, peeling face and red, puffy eyes. Hippopotamus was standing in front of him with his feet planted wide and his hands on his hips, leaning slightly forward. He was yelling. His neck was bluish-gray, his bald patch was blazing a bright sunset purple, and spray was flying out of his mouth in all directions.

Trying not to attract attention, Maxim quietly walked through to his work seat and said hello to the assistant in a quiet voice. Floor Lamp, a nervous, hassled kind of individual, recoiled in horror, his foot slipped on a thick cable, and Maxim only just managed to grab his shoulders in time. The unfortunate Floor Lamp went limp, his eyes rolled back and up, and the blood completely drained from his face. He was a strange man, and hysterically afraid of Maxim. Fish appeared out of nowhere with a little bottle, already opened, that was immediately held up to Floor Lamp’s nose. Floor Lamp hiccupped and came back to life, and before he could slip back into oblivion, Maxim leaned him against a metal cupboard and hastily moved away.

On taking his place in the scanning chair, Maxim discovered that the stranger with the peeling face had stopped listening to Hippopotamus and was instead intently studying him. Maxim amiably smiled. The stranger inclined his head slightly. At this point Hippopotamus slammed his fist down onto the desk with an appalling crash and grabbed the phone. The stranger took advantage of the pause that followed to utter several words, of which Maxim could only make out “must” and “mustn’t.” The stranger picked up a sheet of thick, bluish paper with a bright green border off the desk and fluttered it in the air in front of Hippopotamus’s face. Hippopotamus peevishly waved it aside and instantly started barking into the phone. “Must,” “mustn’t” and the incomprehensible “massaraksh” gushed out of him like the bounties flooding out of a horn of plenty, and Maxim also caught the word for “window.” It all ended with Hippopotamus angrily flinging down the receiver and bellowing at the stranger several more times, spraying him with saliva from head to foot, before shooting out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

The stranger mopped off his face with a handkerchief, got up out of his chair, opened a long, flat box that was lying on the windowsill, and took some kind of dark clothing out of it.

“Come here,” he said to Maxim. “Get dressed.”

Maxim looked over at Fish.

“Go,” said Fish. “Get dressed. Must.”

Maxim realized that the long-awaited turning point in his destiny was finally arriving: someone somewhere had decided something. Forgetting Fish’s admonitions, he immediately pulled off the ugly coverall and arrayed himself, with the stranger’s help, in the new attire. To Maxim’s mind, this attire was not remarkable for either its beauty or its comfort, but it was exactly the same as what the stranger himself was wearing. He could even have surmised that the stranger had sacrificed his own spare set of clothes, since the sleeves were too short while the trousers hung down behind like a sack and kept slipping off Maxim’s hips. However, everyone else present found Maxim’s appearance in his new clothes very much to their liking. The stranger muttered something approving and Fish, softening the features of her face—as far as that is possible for a bream—stroked Maxim’s shoulders and tugged the jacket down on him, and even Floor Lamp flashed a pallid smile from his refuge behind the control desk.

“Let’s go,” the stranger said, and set off toward the door through which the enraged Hippopotamus had rushed out.

“Good-bye,” Maxim said to Fish. “Thank you,” he added in Russian.

“Good-bye,” Fish replied. “Maxim good. Healthy. Must.”

She seemed to be moved. Or perhaps she was concerned because the suit didn’t fit very well? Maxim waved to poor Floor Lamp and hurried after the stranger.

They walked through several rooms cluttered with ponderous, antiquated apparatuses, rode down to the first floor in an elevator that rattled and clanged, and arrived in the spacious, low vestibule to which Gai had brought Maxim several days earlier. And just like several days earlier, they had to wait while documents of some kind were written out, while a funny little man in a ludicrous hat scratched something on pink forms, and the red-eyed stranger scratched something on green forms, and then a young woman with optical enhancers on her eyes applied violet impressions to these forms, and everybody exchanged forms and impressions, in the process getting confused and shouting at each other, and grabbing the phone, and eventually the little man in the ludicrous hat took two green forms and one pink one for himself, tearing the pink form in half and giving one half to the girl who had applied the impressions, and the stranger with the peeling face was given two pink forms and a piece of thick blue cardboard, as well as a round metal counter with words stamped on it, and a minute later he gave all of this to a tall, strapping man with bright buttons who was standing by the exit, only twenty steps away from the little man in the ludicrous headgear, and as they were already walking out into the street, the strapping man started hoarsely shouting, and the red-eyed stranger went back again, and when he came back explained to Maxim that he had forgotten to take the square of cardboard, which he stuffed inside his jacket with a deep sigh. Only after that was Maxim, who was already streaming with sweat, allowed to get into an irrationally long automobile, taking a seat to the right of the red-eyed man, who was extremely agitated and panting hard and kept reciting Hippopotamus’s favorite mantra: “massaraksh.”

The car started growling and smoothly moved off, winding its way out through a motionless herd of other cars, all empty and wet, before driving across the large, asphalted square in front of the building, around an immense flower bed with withered flowers, past a high yellow wall with broken glass scattered along its top, and finally rolling up to the turn onto the express highway, where it braked to a sharp halt.

“Massaraksh,” the red-eyed man hissed again, and switched off the engine.

A long column of identical trucks, with bodies made of crookedly riveted, bent iron, painted in blotches, stretched out along the highway. Rows of motionless round objects with a damp metallic glint protruded above the sides of the trucks, which were moving at a leisurely pace and maintaining the correct intervals, with their engines smoothly murmuring, and diffusing an appalling stench of organic combustion products.

Maxim examined the door on his side, figured out what did what, and raised the window. Without looking at him, the red-eyed man uttered a long phrase that was absolutely incomprehensible.

“I don’t understand,” said Maxim.

The red-eyed man turned toward him with an expression of surprise and, if his intonation was anything to go by, asked a question.

“I don’t understand,” Maxim repeated.

The red-eyed man seemed even more surprised by that. He reached into his pocket and took out a flat box filled with little white sticks, stuck one of them in his mouth, and offered the others to Maxim. Out of politeness Maxim took the little box and stated examining it. The box was made of cardboard and had a pungent smell of dried plant matter of some kind. Maxim took one of the little sticks, bit off a small piece, and chewed it. Then he hastily lowered the window, stuck his head out and spat. It wasn’t food.

“Mustn’t,” he said, handing the little box back to the red-eyed man. “Tastes bad.”

The red-eyed man looked at him with his mouth half-open and the little white stick adhering to his lip and dangling from it. Following the local rules, Maxim touched the tip of his own nose with one finger and introduced himself: “Maxim.” The red-eyed man muttered something and a little flame suddenly appeared in his hand; he lowered the end of the little white stick into it, and immediately the car was filled with nauseating smoke.

“Massaraksh!” Maxim exclaimed, and indignantly flung the door open. “Mustn’t!”

He had realized what the little sticks were. In the passenger car that he traveled in with Gai, almost all the men had been poisoning the air with exactly the same kind of smoke, only they hadn’t used little white sticks to do it but long or short wooden objects that looked like children’s whistles from some ancient era. They were breathing in some kind of narcotic—undoubtedly an extremely injurious habit, and at that time, in the train, Maxim’s only consolation had been that the likable Gai was clearly also categorically opposed to this custom.

The stranger hurriedly tossed the little narcotic stick out the window and for some reason flapped his hand in front of his face. Just to be on the safe side, Maxim also flapped his hand and then introduced himself again. The red-eyed man turned out to be called Fank, and that was as far as the conversation went. They sat there for about five minutes, exchanging affable glances and taking turns pointing at the endless column of trucks and repeating “massaraksh” to each other. Then the interminable column finally came to an end, and Fank drove out onto the highway.

He must have been in a hurry. In any case, he immediately revved up the engine to a velvety roar, switched on some device that broadcast an abhorrent howling, and set off—in Maxim’s opinion completely disregarding every rule of safety—racing along the highway, overtaking the column, and barely managing to dodge the cars hurtling toward him.

They passed the column of trucks and then, almost flying out onto the roadside, passed a wide red carriage with a solitary, very wet driver; they slipped past a wooden cart on wobbling wheels with spokes, drawn by a wet fossil of an animal, drove a group of howling pedestrians wearing canvas cloaks into a ditch, and then flew under the sheltering branches of huge trees with spreading crowns, planted in neat rows on each side of the road. Fank kept increasing speed, setting the oncoming stream of air roaring through the streamlined cowling, and vehicles ahead of them, frightened by this roaring, squeezed up close against the side of the road, making way. It seemed to Maxim that the car hadn’t been designed for this kind of speed—it was too unstable—and he felt rather anxious.

Soon buildings sprang up, flanking the road on both sides, the car hurtled into the city, and Fank was forced to reduce speed. The first time, with Gai, Maxim had traveled through the city in a large public vehicle, crammed unbelievably full of passengers. His head was jammed against the low ceiling, people on every side were swearing and smoking, and the ones standing next to him kept callously stepping on his feet and jamming sharp corners of some kind into his sides. It was late evening, the windows hadn’t been washed for a long time, and they were splattered with mud and caked with dust. And, in addition, they reflected the light of the little lamps inside the vehicle, so Maxim hadn’t seen anything of the city. But now he was a given a chance to see it.

The streets were disproportionately narrow and completely choked with traffic. Fank’s automobile barely even crept along, boxed in on all sides by vehicles of every possible kind. The rear wall of a van, covered in gaudy, brightly colored inscriptions and crude images of people and animals, towered up in front of them. On their left two identical cars crawled along, neither overtaking nor falling back, crammed with gesticulating men and women. Beautiful, striking women, not like Fish. Farther to the left some kind of electric train trudged along with a rattling and rumbling of iron, constantly scattering blue and green sparks; it was completely choked with passengers, who were hanging out of all the doors in bunches. On the right there was a sidewalk, a motionless strip of asphalt where traffic was forbidden. People wearing wet clothes in various tones of black and gray were walking along the sidewalk in a dense stream, colliding with each other, overtaking each other, dodging away from each other, forcing their way forward with their shoulders, continually running in through open, brightly lit doorways and mingling with the seething crowds behind immense misted-up windows, and sometimes suddenly gathering into large groups, creating blockages and whirlpools, craning their necks and peering at something or other. There were very many thin, pale faces, very similar to Fish’s face, and almost all of them were unattractive, morbidly scrawny, excessively pale, haggard, and angular. But they gave the impression of contented people; they laughed frequently and willingly, they acted spontaneously, their eyes glowed, and their voices rang out, loud and lively, on all sides. Perhaps this is a fairly successful world after all, Maxim thought. In any case, although the streets are dirty, at least they’re not piled high with garbage, and the buildings look quite cheerful; almost all the windows have a light in them because the day is overcast, and that means they obviously have no shortage of electricity. The advertising announcements glitter quite merrily, and as for the haggard faces, with this level of street noise and this level of air pollution, you could hardly expect anything else. It’s a poor world, poorly organized, and not entirely healthy… but outwardly at least it appears to be fairly successful.

Suddenly something about the street changed. Agitated shouts rang through the air. A man climbed up a streetlamp, hung there, and started strenuously shouting, waving his free hand around. The crowd on the sidewalk started singing. People stopped, tearing off their hats, rolling up their eyes, and singing, shouting themselves hoarse, raising their narrow faces toward the huge multicolored inscriptions that had suddenly blazed into life across the street.

“Massaraksh,” Fank hissed, and the car abruptly swerved.

Maxim looked at Fank. He was deathly pale and his face was contorted. Shaking his head around, he lifted one hand off the oval of the steering wheel with a struggle and stared at his watch. “Massaraksh,” he groaned, and added several more words, but the only ones Maxim could recognize were “I don’t understand.” Then Fank looked back over his shoulder, and his face contorted even more agonizingly. Maxim looked back too, but there was nothing special behind them. Just a completely enclosed bright yellow vehicle, like a square box, moving along the street.

The shouting in the street was completely unbearable now, but that wasn’t what bothered Maxim. Fank was obviously losing consciousness, but the car was still moving. The van in front of them braked, its signal lights lit up, and the brightly daubed wall suddenly leaped toward them; there was a repulsive scraping sound and a dull thud, and the car’s warped hood stood up on end.

“Fank!” Maxim shouted. “Fank! Mustn’t!”

Fank lay there with one hand and his head lowered onto the steering wheel, groaning loudly and frequently. All around them brakes squealed as the traffic came to a standstill and horns sounded. Maxim shook Fank by the shoulder, then let go of him, swung his own door open, stuck his head out, and shouted in Russian, “Over here! He needs help!” A singing, yelling, clamoring crowd of people had already gathered by the car, energetically gesturing and brandishing their fists in the air above their heads. Maxim saw dozens of pairs of glaring, bloodshot eyes rolling around in their sockets. He didn’t understand anything at all; either these people were outraged by the accident, or they were delighted to distraction about something, or they were threatening somebody.

It was pointless to shout—he couldn’t even hear himself—and Maxim turned back to Fank, who was lying slumped back with his head dangling, kneading his temples, cheeks, and cranium with all his might, and there was saliva bubbling out between his lips. Maxim realized that Fank was suffering intolerable pain; he took a firm hold of Fank’s elbows, hurriedly bracing himself in order to transfuse the pain into himself. He wasn’t sure that it would work with a being from a different planet—he couldn’t find the nerve contact he was looking for—and then Fank suddenly tore his hands away from his temples and started pushing Maxim in the chest with what little strength he had left, desperately muttering something in a tearful, wailing voice. The only thing Maxim could understand was: “Go, go…” Fank was obviously raving.

At that point the door beside Fank swung open and two flushed faces, crowned by black berets and surmounting rows of glinting metal buttons, were thrust into the car. Immediately a multitude of firm, strong hands grabbed Maxim by his shoulders, sides, and neck, tore him away from Fank, and dragged him out. He didn’t resist—there was no menace or evil intent in these hands, quite the opposite in fact. He was dragged away into the crowd, and from there he saw the two men in berets leading Fank, doubled over, to the yellow vehicle, and another three men in berets driving the people who were waving their arms around away from him. And then the crowd roared as it closed around the crippled car, which awkwardly stirred, rising up and turning on its side, so that Maxim briefly glimpsed its wheels slowly turning in the air, and then it was already lying on its roof, and the crowd was clambering onto it, and everybody was shouting and singing, and they were all in the grip of some strange, rabid, frenzied merriment.

Maxim was forced back toward the wall of a building and pressed up against the wet glass of a shop window. Craning his neck to look over people’s heads, he saw the square yellow automobile, covered with a multitude of bright, glittering lights, start moving with a brassy screech, force its way through the crowd of people and vehicles, and disappear from sight.

4

Late that evening Maxim realized he had seen quite enough of this city, and he didn’t want to see any more, but he did want to eat something. He had spent the entire day on his feet and seen a quite extraordinary number of things, without understanding very much at all, but simply by listening he had learned several new words and identified several of the local letters on signs and posters. The unfortunate incident with Fank had bewildered and startled him, but overall he was glad to have been left to his own devices once again. He liked his independence, and he had missed it all the time he was stuck in Hippopotamus’s five-story termite hill with its poor ventilation. After thinking for a while, he had decided to temporarily get lost. Politeness was all very well, but information was more important. Of course, the first contact procedure was a sacred business, but no better chance to gather independent information was likely to come his way.

The city had astounded him. It was huddled down close against the ground. All the traffic here moved either across the ground or under the ground, and the gigantic spaces between buildings and above buildings were left empty, abandoned to the smoke, rain, and mist. The city was gray, smoky, colorless, and somehow the same everywhere—not because of the buildings, which included some rather beautiful ones, not because of the uniform teeming of the crowds on the streets, not because of the incessant dampness, and not because of the incredible lifelessness of its unrelenting stone and asphalt. Its sameness sprang from something more basic than all that. It was like a gigantic clockwork mechanism, in which none of the component parts are identical but everything moves, turns, engages, and disengages in a unified, endless rhythm, any change in which signifies only one thing: malfunction, breakdown, and stoppage. Streets with tall stone buildings were succeeded by small streets with little wooden houses; swarming crowds were succeeded by the magnificent emptiness of broad public squares; gray, brown, and black suits under elegant capes were succeeded by gray, brown, and black rags under tattered, faded cloaks; regular, uniform droning was succeeded by the sudden, frenzied blaring of car horns, howling, and singing; all of this was interconnected, rigidly interlinked, and predetermined since time immemorial by certain unfathomable, internal functional correlations, and nothing had any independent significance. All the people looked just the same, they all acted in exactly the same way, and the moment you could get a close look and grasp the rules of crossing the streets, you vanished, dissolving into all the other people, and you could move along in the crowd for a thousand years without attracting the slightest attention. This was probably a complicated world, controlled by many laws, but Maxim had already discovered one of them, the main one: do what everybody else does, and do it in the same way as they do it. For the first time in his life he wanted to be like everybody else.

He saw some individuals who behaved differently from everybody else, and these people filled him with a keen sense of revulsion—they barged their way across the flow, staggering and grabbing at people coming toward them, slipping and falling, they had a repulsive and surprising smell, and other people shunned them but left them alone. Some of these individuals even lay stretched out beside walls in the rain.

Maxim also did as everybody else did. Moving with the crowd, he flocked into the echoing public emporiums under dirty glass roofs; moving with everybody else, he emerged from these emporiums; moving with everybody else, he went down under the ground, squeezed into overcrowded electric trains, and went hurtling off somewhere with an incredible rumbling and clattering; swept onward with the torrent, he then came back up onto the surface, into new streets exactly like the old ones; when the flow of people divided, Maxim chose one of the streams and went whirling away with it…

Then evening came, the feeble streetlamps came on, hanging high up above the ground and not illuminating anything, and the large streets became completely congested. In the face of this congestion Maxim retreated and found himself in an almost empty, dimly lit side street. That was where he realized he’d had enough for today and stopped.

He saw three glowing golden spheres, a blinking blue sign woven out of gas discharge tubes, and a door leading into a semi-basement area. He already knew that as a rule three golden spheres were used to indicate places where food was served. He walked down the chipped steps and saw a small dining area with a low ceiling, ten empty tables, a floor that had just been sprinkled with fresh sawdust, and a glass buffet laden with brightly lit bottles of liquids in all the colors of the rainbow. There was almost no one in this café. A pudgy elderly woman in a white jacket with the sleeves turned up was sluggishly moving around behind a nickel-plated barrier beside the buffet; a little distance away a diminutive but sturdy man with a pale, square face and a thick black mustache was sitting at a round table in a casual pose. There was no one here shouting, or teeming, or emitting narcotic fumes.

Maxim walked in, chose a table in a niche as far away as possible from the buffet, and took a seat. The pudgy woman behind the barrier looked in his direction and said something in a hoarse, loud voice. The man with the mustache also glanced at him with vacant eyes, turned away, picked up a tall glass containing a transparent liquid that was sitting in front of him, took a sip, and set it back down. Somewhere a door slammed and a pretty young woman in a white, lacy apron appeared in the room, looked around to find Maxim, walked over to him, leaned on the table with her fingers, and started looking over his head. She had clear, delicate skin, a light down on her upper lip, and beautiful gray eyes. Maxim debonairly touched the tip of his nose with his finger and said, “Maxim.”

The girl looked at him in astonishment, as if she had only just noticed him. She was so sweet that Maxim couldn’t help smiling from ear to ear, and she smiled too, pointed to her nose, and said, “Rada.”

“Good,” said Maxim. “Supper.”

She nodded and asked something. Maxim nodded too, just to be on the safe side. He smiled as he watched her walk away—she was slim and light, and it was pleasant to recall that this world also had beautiful people in it.

The pudgy woman at the buffet uttered a long, querulous phrase and retreated behind her barrier. They adore barriers here, thought Maxim. They have barriers everywhere. As if everything here were high voltage. At this point he realized that the man with the mustache was looking at him, and looking at him in an unpleasant, unfriendly kind of way. And on closer inspection, the man himself had a generally unfriendly air about him. It was hard to say exactly what the issue was, but for some reason he aroused associations with either a wolf or a monkey. So let him stare. We won’t worry about him…

Rada appeared again and set down a plate of steaming meat-and-vegetable mush and a thick glass mug of frothy liquid in front of Maxim.

“Good,” said Maxim, and slapped the chair beside him in invitation. He very much wanted Rada to sit there for a while as he was eating and tell him about something, so that he could listen to her voice for a while, and she could sense how much he liked her and how good he felt being beside her.

But Rada only smiled and shook her head. She said something—Maxim made out the word “sit”—and walked away to the barrier. A pity, thought Maxim. He took the two-pronged fork and started eating, trying to compose a phrase expressing friendliness, liking, and a need for companionship out of the thirty words that he knew.

Standing there, leaning back against the barrier with her arms crossed, Rada kept glancing at him. Every time their eyes met, they smiled at each other, and Maxim was rather surprised that every time Rada’s smile became paler and more uncertain. He himself was experiencing very mixed feelings. He enjoyed looking at Rada, but this sensation was mingled with a growing sense of disquiet. He had a feeling of satisfaction from the food, which proved to be surprisingly delicious and quite hearty, but at the same time he could sense the sidelong glance of the man with the mustache and unmistakably discern the pudgy woman’s disapproval emanating from behind the barrier… He took a cautious sip from the mug—it was beer, cold and fresh, but rather too strong. Not for everyone.

The man with the mustache said something, and Rada walked over to his table. They struck up a muted conversation, ill tempered and hostile, but at that point a fly attacked Maxim, and he had to do battle with it. The fly was brawny, blue, and brazen, and it seemed to come flying at Maxim from all sides at once; it buzzed and droned as if it were making a declaration of love to him; it refused to fly away, it wanted to be here, with him and his plate, walking over them and licking them; it was obstinate and garrulous. The whole business finished with Maxim making a false move and the fly crashing into his beer. Maxim fastidiously moved the mug to another table and set about eating the stew.

Rada came over and asked him something without smiling, looking off to the side. “Yes,” said Maxim, just to be on the safe side. “Rada is good.”

She glanced at him in undisguised fright, walked away to the barrier, and came back, carrying a shot glass of brown liquid on a saucer.

“Tastes good,” said Maxim, giving the girl an affectionate, concerned look. “What’s bad? Rada, sit here, talk. Must talk. Mustn’t go away.”

This carefully thought-out oration produced an unexpectedly bad impression on Rada. Maxim actually thought she was going to burst into tears. In any case, her lips started trembling, and she whispered something and ran out of the room. The pudgy woman behind the barrier uttered several indignant words. I’m doing something wrong, Maxim anxiously thought. But he absolutely couldn’t imagine what it was. All he understood was that neither the man with the mustache nor the pudgy woman wanted Rada to “sit and talk” with him. But since they were obviously not representatives of public authority or guardians of the law, and since Maxim was obviously not breaking any laws, there was probably no need to take the opinion of these disgruntled individuals into consideration.

The man with the mustache muttered something under his breath but with a distinctly unpleasant intonation, finished his glass in a single gulp, took a thick, black, lacquered cane out from under the table, got up, and unhurriedly walked across to Maxim. He sat down facing him, set the cane across the table, and, without looking at Maxim but clearly addressing him, started straining slow, heavy words through his teeth, frequently repeating the word “massaraksh.” His speech seemed as black and polished by frequent use as his ugly cane; this speech contained a distinct, black threat, and a challenge, and animosity, and all of this was strangely blurred by the indifference of his intonation, the indifference on his face, and the vacancy of his glassy eyes.

“I don’t understand,” Maxim said angrily.

Then the man with the mustache turned his pale face toward Maxim, seeming to look straight through him, slowly asked a question, enunciating every word separately, then suddenly whipped a knife with a long, narrow, glittering blade out of the cane. Maxim was actually caught unawares. Not knowing what to say or how to react, he picked up the fork off the table and twirled it in his fingers. That had an unexpected effect on the man with the mustache, who softly sprang back, knocking over his chair, but without standing up; he awkwardly squatted down, holding the knife out in front of him. His mustache rose up, revealing his long, yellow teeth.

The pudgy woman behind the barrier gave an ear-splitting squeal, and Maxim jumped to his feet in surprise. The man with the mustache was suddenly right up close to him, but at that very second Rada appeared out of nowhere, set herself between the man and Maxim, and started shouting loudly and vehemently—first at the man with the mustache and then, turning around, at Maxim. At this stage Maxim understood absolutely nothing at all, but the man with the mustache suddenly gave a gruesome smile, picked up his cane, hid the knife in it, and set off toward the exit. In the doorway he looked back, flung out a few words in a quiet voice, and disappeared.

Pale-faced, with her lips trembling, Rada picked up the fallen chair, wiped up the spilled brown liquid with a napkin, collected the dirty dishes and took them away, then came back and said something to Maxim. Maxim replied, “Yes,” but that didn’t help. Rada repeated the same thing, and her voice sounded angry, but Maxim sensed that she was less angry than frightened. “No,” Maxim said, and the woman behind the barrier immediately started yelling, with her cheeks quaking, and then Maxim finally confessed, “I don’t understand.”

The woman darted out from behind the barrier and flew across to Maxim, without stopping yelling even for a second. She planted herself in front of him with her hands propped on her hips, still yelling. Then she grabbed hold of his clothes and started crudely rifling through his pockets. Maxim was dumbfounded and didn’t try to resist. He simply kept repeating, “Mustn’t,” and plaintively glancing at Rada. The pudgy woman shoved him in the chest and, as if she had made some terrible decision, rushed back to her place behind the barrier and grabbed the receiver of the phone there. Maxim realized that he had been discovered not to have all those pink and green pieces of paper with lilac imprints, without which it was apparently not permitted to appear in public spaces here.

“Fank!” he declared with feeling. “Fank is unwell! Go. Bad.”

But then the situation was unexpectedly defused. Rada said something to the pudgy woman, who dropped the phone, carried on clucking for a little longer, and calmed down. Rada sat Maxim in his old place, put a new mug of beer down in front of him, and, to his indescribable delight and relief, sat down beside him. For a while everything went very well. Rada asked questions, Maxim, glowing with delight, replied, “I don’t understand,” and the pudgy woman muttered in the distant background. Focusing intensely, Maxim constructed another phrase and declared that “rain falls massaraksh bad mist.” Rada burst into laughter, and then another young and rather pretty girl arrived and said hello to everybody, she and Rada left the room, and a little while later Rada appeared without her apron, wearing a glittering red cape with a hood and carrying a large check bag.

“Let’s go,” she said, and Maxim jumped to his feet. But they weren’t allowed to leave just like that. The pudgy woman raised a hue and cry again. There was something else she didn’t like, and she started demanding something. This time she was waving a pen and a sheet of paper in the air. Rada argued with her for a while, but the second girl came up and took the woman’s side. They were making an obvious point of some kind, and Rada eventually conceded defeat. Then all three of them started pestering Maxim. At first they kept asking one and the same question separately and in chorus, and Maxim, naturally, didn’t understand. He merely shrugged. Then Rada told everyone to be quiet, gently patted Maxim on the chest, and asked, “Mak Sim?”

“Maxim,” he corrected her. “Maxim. Mak—mustn’t. Sim—mustn’t. Maxim.”

Then Rada set her finger to her nose and said, “Rada Gaal. Maxim…”

Maxim finally realized that for some reason his surname was required, which was strange in itself, but he was far more surprised by something else. “Gaal?” he blurted out. “Gai Gaal?”

Everyone fell silent. They were all astounded.

“Gai Gaal,” Maxim happily repeated. “Gai is good.”

There was uproar, with all the women speaking at once. Rada started pestering Maxim, repeatedly asking him about something. She was obviously terribly interested in how Maxim knew Gai. Gai, Gai, Gai—the name kept surfacing in the torrent of incomprehensible words. The question about Maxim’s own surname was forgotten.

“Massaraksh!” the pudgy woman finally exclaimed, and burst out laughing. The girls started laughing too, and Rada handed Maxim her check bag and took him by the arm, and they walked out into the rain.

They walked to the end of that poorly lit side street and turned into an even more poorly lit side street, with crooked little wooden houses along the sides of a dirty road that was unevenly paved with cobblestones, then they turned another corner, and another. The crooked little streets were empty and they didn’t meet a single person along their way, lampshades of various colors glowed behind curtains in the weak-sighted little windows, and every now and then they heard muted music—choral singing in poor voices.

At first Rada chattered away in a lively fashion, often repeating the name Gai, and Maxim kept confirming that Gai was good, but he added in Russian that you shouldn’t punch people in the face, that it was strange and he, Maxim, didn’t understand it. However, as the streets became narrower and narrower, darker and drizzlier, Rada’s chatter broke off more and more often. Sometimes she stopped and peered into the darkness, and Maxim thought she was choosing the driest route, but she was searching for something else in that darkness, because she didn’t see the puddles, and every time Maxim had to gently tug her over onto the dry spots, and where there weren’t any dry spots, he took her under his arm and carried her across. She liked it, and every time she swooned in delight, but then immediately forgot about it, because she was afraid. The farther away they went from the café, the more afraid she was; at first Maxim tried to establish nerve contact with her, in order to transmit a little courage and confidence, but it didn’t work, just as it hadn’t worked with Fank. And when they left the slums behind and came out onto a completely muddy, unpaved road, with an endless, wet wall surmounted by rusty barbed wire running along on the right, and a pitch-black, foul-smelling wasteland without a single light on the left, Rada’s courage failed her and she almost started crying. In order to lift the mood at least a little, Maxim started singing the most cheerful songs he knew one after another at the top of his voice, and that helped, but not for long, only as far as the end of the wall, and then there were rows of buildings again—long, yellow two-story buildings with dark windows that gave off a smell of cooling metal, organic lubricant, and something else stifling and smoky. The sparse streetlamps glowed nebulously, and there were men in the distance, sullenly loitering under a tawdry sort of blind archway. Rada stopped.

She clutched Maxim’s arm and started speaking in a fitful whisper, full of fear for herself and even more for him. Whispering, she tugged him back, and he complied, thinking it would make her feel better, but then he realized it was simply an unreasoning act of despair, and dug his heels in. “Let’s go,” he gently told her. “Let’s go, Rada. Nothing bad. Good.” She obeyed him like a child. He led her on, although he didn’t know the way, and suddenly realized that she was afraid of those wet figures, and he was very surprised, because there was nothing terrible or dangerous about them—they were just ordinary members of the indigenous population, huddled up under the rain and shivering from the damp. At first there were two of them, then a third and a fourth appeared from somewhere with the little glowing lights of narcotic sticks.

Maxim walked along the empty street between the yellow buildings, straight at those figures, and Rada pressed herself closer and closer against him, and he put his arm around her shoulders. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he had been mistaken and Rada was trembling not in fear but simply from the cold. There was absolutely nothing dangerous about those wet men, and he walked straight past them, past those hunched-over, long-faced, chilled-through men with their hands stuck deep in their pockets, stamping their feet to warm themselves up, those pitiful men poisoned by their narcotic, and they didn’t even seem to notice him and Rada, they didn’t even raise their eyes, although he walked by so close that he could hear their morbid, irregular breathing. He thought that now at least Rada would calm down, now that they were already under the archway—and then suddenly another four men appeared out of thin air up ahead of them, as if they had detached themselves from the yellow walls, and stood across the path, blocking it; they were as wet and pitiful as the others, but one of them had a long, thick cane, and Maxim recognized him.

Under the flaking dome of the grotesque archway a naked lightbulb dangled, swinging to and fro in the draft. The walls were covered with mold and cracks, and the cracked concrete under their feet bore the dirty tracks of innumerable feet and car tires. There was a sudden hollow tramping behind them, and Maxim looked back—the first four men were pursuing them, breathing fitfully and irregularly, keeping their hands in their pockets and spitting out their repulsive narcotic sticks as they ran. Rada gave a muffled cry and let go of his arm, and suddenly the space was crowded: Maxim was forced back against the wall, and the men were standing just a hair’s breadth away, but they didn’t touch him, they kept their hands in their pockets, they didn’t even look at him, they just stood there, not allowing him to move, and over their heads he saw two of them holding Rada by the arms, and the man with the mustache strolled over to her, unhurriedly transferred the cane to his left hand, and in the same leisurely style lazily slapped her on the cheek with his right hand.

This was so barbarous and impossible that Maxim lost his sense of reality. Something shifted out of kilter in his consciousness. The men disappeared. There were only two people here, himself and Rada; the others had all disappeared. Their place had been taken by fearsome, dangerous animals, trampling in the mud with clumsy, terrifying movements. The city disappeared, together with the archway and the lightbulb above his head. This was a region of impassable mountains, the country of Oz on Pandora; this was a cave, an abominable trap set by naked, spotted monkeys, and the blurred, yellow moon was indifferently peering into the cave, and he had to fight in order to survive. And he started fighting just as he had fought that time on Pandora.

Time accommodatingly slowed down and stretched out, the seconds became very, very long, and in the course of each one it was possible to make very many different movements and strike many blows while seeing everything at once. They were heavy-footed, these monkeys, they were used to dealing with different quarry, and they probably simply weren’t quick thinking enough to realize that they had made the wrong choice, that the best thing for them would have been to run, so they tried to fight… Maxim grabbed one wild beast by the lower jaw, jerked up the yielding head, chopped the edge of his hand hard against the pale, pulsating neck, and immediately turned to the next one. He grabbed, jerked, and chopped, then grabbed, jerked, and chopped again—in the cloud of their stinking, predatory breath, in the hollow silence of the cave, in the yellow, weeping semi-darkness—and filthy talons tore at his neck and slipped off, yellow fangs sank deep into his shoulder and also slipped off… There was no one near him any longer, and the leader with the club was hurrying toward the exit of the cave—because, like all leaders, he had the fastest reactions and had been the first to realize what was happening—and Maxim fleetingly pitied him, because his fast reactions were so slow. The seconds stretched out, becoming even slower, the fleet-footed leader was barely even moving his legs, and Maxim, slipping between the seconds, drew level with him and chopped him down as he ran, and immediately stopped.

Time returned to its normal rate of movement, the cave became an archway, the moon became a lightbulb, and the land of Oz on Pandora turned back into an incomprehensible city on an obscure planet that was even more incomprehensible than Pandora…

Maxim stood there, resting, with his itching hands lowered. The leader with the mustache was laboriously crawling around at his feet, and blood was flowing from Maxim’s wounded shoulder. Then Rada took him by the hand and sobbed as she ran his palm across her own wet face. He looked around. The bodies were scattered about like sacks on the concrete floor. He instinctively counted them—six, including the leader—and thought that two of them had gotten away. Rada’s touch felt pleasurable beyond words, and he knew he had acted as he had to act, and done what he had to do—not a jot more and not a jot less. So let the ones who had managed to get away, get away. He didn’t pursue them, although he could have caught up with them—even now he could hear the panic-stricken clattering of their shoes at the end of the tunnel. As for those who had not managed to get away, they were lying here, and some of them would die, and some of them were already dead, and now he realized that they were men after all, and not spotted monkeys or armored wolves, although their breath was rank smelling, their touches were foul, and their intentions were predatory and hideous. Nonetheless, he had a certain feeling of regret and sensed a loss, as if he had forfeited some kind of chastity, as if he had lost a small, integral part of the soul of the previous Maxim, and he knew that the previous Maxim had disappeared forever, and that gave him a slightly bitter feeling, which roused an unfamiliar kind of pride in him.

“Let’s go, Maxim,” Rada told him in a quiet voice.

And he docilely followed her.

“You Let Him Get Away…”

“In short, you let him get away.”

“There was nothing I could have done. You know yourself the way things happen—”

“Damn it, Fank! You didn’t even have to do anything. It would have been enough just to take a driver with you.”

“I know it’s my fault. But who could have expected—”

“That’s enough about that. What measures have you taken?”

“As soon as they let me go, I called Megu. Megu doesn’t know anything. If he comes back, Megu will inform me immediately. Beyond that, I’ve put all the insane asylums under observation. He can’t get very far, he simply won’t be allowed to, he sticks out like a sore thumb. He doesn’t have any documents. I’ve given instructions that I must be informed about everyone who is detained without documents. He doesn’t have any chance of hiding, even if he wants to. In my opinion, it’s a matter of two or three days… A simple matter.”

“Simple… What could have been simpler: get into a car, drive to the telecenter, and bring a man here. But you couldn’t even manage that.”

“I’m sorry. But a set of circumstances like that—”

“I told you, no more about the circumstances. Is he really like a madman?”

“It’s hard to say… He’s like a savage more than anything, I’d say. Like a well-washed and well-groomed Highlander. But I can easily imagine a situation in which he would appear to be insane. And then there’s that perpetual idiotic smile, and that cretinous babbling instead of normal speech. And in general he’s some kind of simpleton.”

“I see. I approve of the measures you’ve taken. But there’s one more thing, Fank. Get in touch with the underground.”

“What?”

“If you don’t find him in the next few days, he’s bound to turn up in the underground.”

“I don’t understand what a savage would be doing in the underground.”

“There are plenty of savages in the underground. And don’t ask stupid questions, just do as I tell you. If you let him get away again, I’ll fire you.”

“I won’t let him get away a second time.”

“I’m glad for your sake… What else?”

“A curious rumor about Blister.”

“About Blister? What, exactly?”

“If you don’t mind, Wanderer… If you’ll permit me, I’d prefer to whisper it in your ear…”