The Inhabited Island

9

His guide quietly said “Wait here” and walked away, disappearing among the bushes behind the trees. Maxim sat down on a tree stump in the center of the clearing, thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his canvas trousers, and started waiting. The forest was old and untended, stifled by dense underbrush, and the ancient, wizened tree trunks exuded an odor of dead, decaying wood. The air was damp. Maxim shivered; he was feeling nauseous and wanted to sit in the sunshine for a while to warm up his shoulder. There was someone in the bushes nearby, but Maxim took no notice—he had been followed all the way from the village, and he had nothing against that. It would have been strange if they immediately trusted him.

Off to one side a little girl came out into the clearing, wearing a huge, patched blouse and carrying a basket in one hand. She fixed Maxim with an intent stare and kept her eyes on him as she walked past, stumbling and getting her feet tangled in the grass. Some kind of small animal like a squirrel streaked through the bushes, flew up a tree, glanced down, took fright, and disappeared. It was quiet here, with only the irregular throbbing of an engine somewhere in the distance—a machine was cutting reeds at a lake.

The man in the bushes didn’t go away—Maxim could feel his baleful stare boring into his back. It was unpleasant, but Maxim had to get used to it. Things would always be like this now. The inhabited island had ganged up on him; first it had shot at him, and now it was trailing him, and it didn’t trust him. Maxim fell into a doze. Recently he had started frequently dozing off at the most inappropriate moments—falling asleep, waking up, and falling asleep again. He didn’t try to resist this; it was what his body wanted, and his body knew best. It would pass; all he needed to do was not fight against it.

He heard the rustling of footsteps, and the guide said “Follow me.” Maxim got up without taking his hands out of his pockets and set off after the guide, looking down at his feet in their soft, wet boots. They went deeper into the forest and started walking in circles and complicated loops, gradually moving closer to a dwelling of some kind, which was actually very close to the clearing in a straight line. Then the guide, deciding that he had confused Maxim enough, set off directly toward their goal through the scrub and wind-fallen trees. Being a town man, he made such a loud racket, with so much rustling, that Maxim couldn’t even hear the footsteps of the man creeping along behind them any longer.

When the wind-fallen trees came to an end, beyond them Maxim saw a small clearing and a lopsided log house with boarded-up windows. The clearing was overgrown with tall grass, but Maxim could see that people had walked here—both very recently and a long time ago. They had walked cautiously, trying to approach the house by a different route every time. The guide opened a squeaky door, and they walked into a dark, musty vestibule. The man who was following them remained outside. The guide heaved open the trapdoor of the cellar and said, “Go down there, and be careful.” He couldn’t see very well in the dark. Maxim walked down the wooden stairs.

The cellar was warm and dry, and there were people it, sitting around a wooden table and goggling with amusing expressions as they tried to scrutinize Maxim. The fumes of a newly extinguished candle hung in the air. They obviously didn’t want Maxim to see their faces. He only recognized two of them: the woman Ordi, old Illy Tader’s daughter, and fat Memo Gramenu, sitting right beside the stairs with a machine gun across his knees. The trapdoor crashed shut above them and someone said, “Who are you? Tell us about yourself.”

“Can I sit down?” Maxim asked.

“Yes, of course. Come this way, toward my voice. You’ll run up against a bench.”

Maxim sat down at the table and ran his glance over the people there. Apart from him, there were four people at the table. In the darkness they looked gray and flat, like an old-fashioned photograph. Ordi was sitting on Maxim’s right, but all the talking was done by a thickset, broad-shouldered man sitting opposite Maxim. He looked unpleasantly like Cornet Chachu.

“Tell us,” he repeated.

Maxim sighed. He really didn’t want to begin this introduction to new acquaintances by lying, but there was nothing to be done about it. “I don’t know my past,” he said. “They say that I’m a Highlander. Maybe so. I don’t remember… My name is Maxim, and my surname is Kammerer. In the Guards they called me Mak Sim. My memory of myself begins from the moment when I was arrested in the forest near the Blue Serpent…”

That was the end of the lying, and after that things went more easily. He told his story, trying to be brief and at the same time not to omit anything that seemed important to him.

“…I led them as far as I could into the quarry, told them to run for it, and walked back without hurrying. Then the cornet shot me. That night I came around, clambered out of the quarry, and soon I came across a pasture. During the day I hid in the bushes, and at night I snuck up to the cows and drank their milk. After a few days I started feeling better. I got some old rags from the cowherds, made my way to Utki Village, and found Illy Tader there. You know all the rest.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Then a rustic-looking man, with long hair down to his shoulders, said, “I don’t understand how it is that he doesn’t remember his past life. I don’t think that happens. Let’s hear what Doc thinks.”

“It does happen,” Doc tersely said. He was a thin, exhausted-looking man, twirling a pipe in his hands. He obviously wanted very badly to smoke.

“Why didn’t you run off with the condemned prisoners?” the broad-shouldered man asked.

“I’d left Gai there,” Maxim said. “I was hoping Gai would go with me.” He fell silent, recalling Gai’s pale face and confused expression, and the cornet’s terrible eyes, and the searing jolts in his chest and belly, and the sensation of helplessness and resentment. “It was stupid, of course,” he said. “But I didn’t understand that then.”

“Did you take part in operations?” corpulent Memo asked behind Maxim’s back.

“I’ve already told you.”

“Tell us again!”

“I took part in only one operation, when Ketshef, Ordi, you, and two others, who didn’t give their names, were arrested. One of them had an artificial hand—he was a professional revolutionary.”

“How do you explain your cornet’s haste? After all, before a candidate is allowed to take the test of blood, he is supposed to take part in at least three operations.”

“I don’t know. All I do know is that he didn’t trust me. But I don’t understand why he sent me to execute—”

“And exactly why did he shoot you?”

“I think he was frightened. I wanted to take his pistol from him.”

“I don’t understand,” said the man with long hair. “All right, so he didn’t trust you. All right, so he sent you to execute the prisoners as a check—”

“Wait, Forester,” said Memo. “This is all just talk, empty words. Doc, if I were you, I’d examine him. Somehow I don’t believe all this business about the cornet.”

“I can’t examine him in the dark,” Doc irritably snapped.

“Then let’s have some light,” Maxim advised him. “I can see you anyway.”

A sudden silence fell.

“What do you mean, you can see us?” the broad-shouldered man asked.

Maxim shrugged. “I just can,” he said.

“What rubbish,” said Memo. “OK, so what am I doing now, if you can see?”

Maxim looked around. “You’re pointing your submachine gun at me—that is, you think you are, but actually it’s pointing at Doc. You’re Memo Gramenu, I know you. You have a scratch on your right cheek that wasn’t there before.”

“Nyctalopia,” Doc growled. “So yes, let’s have some light. It’s stupid. He can see us, but we can’t see him.” He groped about in front of himself for a box of matches and started striking one match after another. They kept breaking.

“Allow me…” Maxim reached out his hand, took the matches from Doc, and lit the candle.

They all squeezed their eyes shut and put their hands over them. Doc immediately lit up his pipe. “Get undressed,” he said through the pipe’s crackling.

Maxim pulled his canvas shirt off over his head. They all stared at his chest. Doc clambered out from behind the table, walked up to Maxim, and started turning him this way and that, palpitating him with firm, cold fingers.

The room was quiet. Then the long-haired man said with a regretful air, “A good-looking boy. My son was… good-looking too…”

When no one replied, he cumbersomely got up and rummaged in the corner of the room, pulling out a large bottle bound in woven straw and putting it on the table. Then he set out three mugs. “We can take turns,” he explained. “If anybody wants a bite to eat, there’s cheese to be had. And onions—”

“Wait, Forester,” the broad-shouldered man said in annoyance. “Move the bottle out of the way, I can’t see anything… Well then, Doc?”

Doc ran his cold fingers over Maxim’s body one more time, wreathed himself in smoke, and sat back down in his place. “Pour me one, Forester,” he said. “Cases like this deserve a toast… Get dressed,” he said to Maxim. “And stop smiling like a fresh rose in spring. I shall have to ask you a few questions.”

Maxim got dressed.

Doc took a sip from his mug, made a wry face, and asked, “When did you say you were shot?”

“Forty-seven days ago.”

“And what did you say you were shot with?”

“A pistol. An army pistol.”

Doc took another sip, made a wry face again, then turned to the broad-shouldered man and said, “I’d stake my life on the fact that this young fellow really was shot with an army pistol, and at very close range, only not forty-seven days ago, but at least a hundred and forty-seven… Where are the bullets?” he abruptly asked Maxim.

“They came out, and I threw them away.”

“Listen, whatever your name is… Mak! You’re lying. Confess now—who did this for you?”

Maxim bit on his lip. “I’m telling the truth. You simply don’t know how quickly our wounds heal. I’m not lying.” He paused for a moment. “Anyway, you can easily check what I say. Cut my arm. If it’s not a deep cut, I’ll heal it up in ten or fifteen minutes.”

“That’s true,” said Ordi, only now speaking for the first time. “I’ve seen it myself. He was peeling potatoes and cut his finger. Half an hour later there was only a white scar left, and the next day there was nothing at all. I think he really is a Highlander. Gel told me about the ancient Highland medicine—they know how to charm away their wounds.”

“Ah, Highland medicine,” said Doc, wreathing himself in smoke again. “Well now, let’s suppose so. Of course, a cut finger is one thing and seven bullets at point-blank range is a different matter, but let’s suppose so. The fact that the wounds healed so successfully isn’t the most surprising thing. What I would like an explanation for is something different. This young man has seven holes in him. And if those holes really were made by genuine pistol bullets, then at least four of them—and each one individually, note!—were fatal.”

Forester gasped and prayerfully folded his hands together.

“What the hell?” exclaimed the broad-shouldered man.

“Oh, no, you must believe me,” said Doc. “A bullet in the heart, a bullet in the spine, and two bullets in the liver. And on top of that, the general loss of blood. And on top of that, the inevitable sepsis. And on top of that, the absence of any traces at all of qualified medical intervention. Massaraksh, the bullet in the heart would have been enough.”

“What do you have to say to that?” the broad-shouldered man asked Maxim.

“He’s mistaken,” Maxim said. “He described everything quite correctly, but he’s mistaken. For us these wounds are not fatal. Now, if the cornet had shot me in the head… but he didn’t… You see, Doc, you can’t even imagine how resilient these organs are—the heart, the liver—they’re simply brimming over with blood…”

“Well now…” said Doc.

“One thing is clear to me,” said the broad-shouldered man said. “They wouldn’t be likely to send us a botched job like this. They know that we have doctors among us.”

There was a long silence. Maxim patiently waited. Would I believe it? he thought. I probably would. But I seem to be altogether too gullible for this world. Although not as gullible as I used to be. For instance, I don’t like Memo. He’s afraid of something all the time. Sitting here among his own people with a machine gun, he’s still afraid of something. It’s strange. But then, he’s probably afraid of me. He’s probably afraid I’ll take his machine gun from him and dislocate his fingers again. Well, maybe he’s right there. I won’t let anybody shoot me again. It’s too hideous when somebody shoots you… He recalled the freezing cold night in the quarry, the dead, phosphorescent sky, the cold, sticky pool that he was lying in. No, no more. I’ve had enough. I’d rather do the shooting myself now…

“I trust him,” Ordi suddenly said. “What he says doesn’t add up, but that’s simply because he’s a strange kind of man. It’s not possible to make up a story like this, it would be too absurd. If I didn’t trust him and I heard a story like this, I’d just shoot him straightaway, but he just piles up one absurdity on top of another. Provocateurs are never like that, comrades… Perhaps he’s insane. That’s possible… But he’s not a provocateur… I vote for him,” she added after a brief pause.

“All right, Bird,” said the broad-shouldered man. “Now keep quiet for a while… Did you go through the medical examination at the Department of Public Health?” he asked Maxim.

“Yes.”

“And you were passed as able-bodied?”

“Of course.”

“With no qualifications?”

“All it said on the card was simply ‘Able-bodied.’”

“What do you think about the Battle Guards?”

“Now I think that they are a mindless weapon in somebody else’s hands. Most likely in the hands of these celebrated Unknown Fathers. But there’s still a lot that I don’t understand.”

“And what do you think about the Unknown Fathers?”

“I think they’re the top brass of a military dictatorship. What I do know about them is very contradictory. Maybe their goals are honorable enough, but the means…” Maxim shook his head.

“What do you think about degenerates?”

“I think the term is inappropriate. I think you are conspirators. I only have a rather vague idea of your goals. But I like the people that I’ve seen for myself. They all seemed to be sincere and… how can I put it?… not anybody’s dupes, acting with their eyes open.”

“Right,” said the broad-shouldered man. “Do you get pains?”

“In my head? No, I don’t.”

“Why ask him about that?” said Forester. “If he had the pains, he wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“That’s what I’m trying to understand: Why is he sitting here?” said the broad-shouldered man. “Why did you come to us? Do you want to join in our struggle?”

Maxim shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it like that. It wouldn’t be true. I want to make sense of things. Right now I’m with you rather than with them, but after all, I know too little about you too.”

They all exchanged glances.

“That’s not the way we do things, my friend,” said Forester. “Where we’re concerned, it’s like this: either you’re with us and then here’s your gun, go and fight, or else you’re not one of us and then, I’m sorry… you understand… where should we shoot you, in the head, right?”

Silence fell again. Doc heaved a sigh and knocked out his pipe against the bench. “A very unusual and difficult case,” he declared. “I have a suggestion. Let him ask a few questions… You do have questions, don’t you, Mak?”

“Yes, I came here to ask them,” Maxim replied.

“He has lots of questions,” Ordi confirmed, laughing. “He pestered my mother to death with his questions. And he pestered me with them too.”

“Ask away,” said the broad-shouldered man. “You can answer him, Doc. And we’ll listen.”

“Who are the Unknown Fathers, and what do they want?” Maxim asked to begin.

They all stirred—they obviously hadn’t been expecting this question.

“The Unknown Fathers,” said Doc, “are an anonymous group of highly experienced schemers, the remnants of a party of putschists who survived a twenty-year struggle for power among military, financial, and political circles. They have two goals: a principal one and a fundamental one. Their principal goal is to stay in power. Their fundamental goal is to derive the maximum gratification from that power. There are some honorable individuals among them, who derive gratification from the fact that they are the people’s benefactors. But for the most part they are money-grabbers, sybarites, and sadists, and they are all lovers of power… Are you satisfied?”

“No,” said Maxim. “You have simply told me that they are tyrants. I already suspected that anyway… What is their economic program? Their ideology? The social base that they rely on?”

They all exchanged glances again. Forester gaped at Maxim with his mouth hanging open.

“Their economic program…” said Doc. “You’re asking too much of us. We’re not theoreticians, we’re practical activists. As for what they rely on, I can tell you that. Bayonets. Ignorance. The weariness of the nation. They won’t build a just society, they don’t even want to think about that… And they don’t have any economic program—they don’t have anything except bayonets, they don’t want anything except power. The most important thing for us is that they want to annihilate us. Quite simply, we’re fighting for our lives.” He started irritably stuffing his pipe.

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” said Maxim. “I’m just trying to make sense of things.” He would have been glad to expound the fundamentals of the theory of historical sequentiality for Doc, but he didn’t have enough words. He still had to shift to thinking in Russian sometimes as it was. “All right. But you said ‘a just society.’ What is that? And what do you want? What are you striving for, apart from saving your own lives? And who are you?”

Doc’s pipe rustled and crackled, and its oppressive stink spread through the cellar.

“Let me,” Forester suddenly put in. “Let me tell him… Let me try… You, my good sir, are too… I don’t know how things are up in your mountains, but here people like to live. What kind of way to talk is that—‘apart from saving your own lives’? Maybe I don’t need anything apart from that! Isn’t that enough for you? You’re a fine, brave hero! You try living in a cellar when you have a house and a wife and a family, and everybody has disowned you… Come off it, now!”

“Wait, Forester,” said the broad-shouldered man.

“No, let him wait! So high and mighty! Give him society, give him some kind of base or other—”

“Wait, my man,” said Doc. “Don’t be angry. You can see he doesn’t understand anything… You see,” he said to Maxim, “our movement is very heterogeneous. We don’t have any unified political program, and we couldn’t have one. We all kill because we are being killed. That’s what has to be understood. You must understand that. We’re all condemned to death; we don’t have much chance of surviving. And all our politics is basically overshadowed by biology. The most important thing is to survive. There’s no time to worry about a social base. So if you’ve shown up with some kind of social program, you won’t get anywhere with it.”

“What’s the basic problem?” Maxim asked.

“We are regarded as degenerates. Where the idea came from, I can’t even remember anymore. But right now it’s advantageous for the Unknown Fathers to hound us—it distracts the people’s attention from internal problems, from the corruption of the financiers, who rake in money from military contracts and building towers. If we didn’t exist, the Fathers would have invented us.”

“That’s already something,” said Maxim. “So money’s at the basis of everything again. So the Unknown Fathers serve money. Who else are they shielding?”

“The Unknown Fathers don’t serve anyone. They are money. They are everything. And at the same time, they’re nothing, because they’re anonymous, and they devour each other all the time… He should have talked to Wild Boar,” he said to the broad-shouldered man. “They would have understood each other.”

“All right, I’ll talk to Wild Boar about the Fathers, but right now—”

“You can’t talk to Wild Boar any longer,” Memo said in a spiteful tone. “Wild Boar’s been shot.”

“He was the man with one hand,” Ordi explained. “You should remember him.”

“I do remember him,” said Maxim. “But he wasn’t shot. He was sentenced to hard labor.”

“That’s not possible,” the broad-shouldered man said. “Wild Boar? Hard labor?”

“Yes,” said Maxim. “Gel Ketshef, sentenced to be executed; Wild Boar, sentenced to hard labor; and another man, who didn’t give his name, was taken by the man in civilian clothes. Obviously for counterintelligence.”

They all fell silent again. Doc took a sip from his mug. The broad-shouldered man sat there with his head propped on his hands. Forester mournfully groaned and cast a pitying glance at Ordi, who tightly pursed her lips and looked down at the table. This was genuine grief, and only Memo in the corner was more fearful than sorrowful… Men like that shouldn’t be trusted with machine guns, Maxim fleetingly thought. He’ll shoot all of us right here.

“All right, then,” said the broad-shouldered man. “Do you have any more questions?”

“I have a lot of questions,” Maxim slowly replied. “But I’m afraid all of them are more or less tactless.”

“Well, never mind, ask your tactless questions.”

“All right, my final question. What do the antiballistic defense towers have to do with all of this? What do you have against them?”

They all laughed in a rather unpleasant manner. “What a fool,” said Forester. “There he goes again—give him a social base…”

“They’re not ADTs,” said Doc. “They’re our curse. They invented a kind of radiation that helped them create the concept of the degenerate. Most people—you, for instance—don’t even notice this radiation, as if it doesn’t even exist. But owing to certain peculiarities of their biology, an unfortunate minority suffer agonizing pains when exposed to it. Some of us—only very few—can tolerate this pain, but some can’t bear it and they scream out loud, some lose consciousness, and some actually go insane and die… The towers aren’t antiballistic defense structures—no defenses of that kind exist. They’re not necessary, because neither Hontia nor Pandeia have any ballistic missiles or aircraft. They have no time for any of that; their civil war has been going on for more than three years. The towers are radiation transmitters. They’re switched on twice every twenty-four hours, all across the country, and then they catch us while we’re lying there helpless with pain. And in addition, there are limited-range devices in patrol vehicles, plus freestanding mobile transmitters, plus random radiation transmissions at night. There’s nowhere for us to hide; there are no screens against it. We go insane, shoot ourselves, commit stupid acts in our desperation. We’re dying out…”

Doc broke off, grabbed his mug, and drained it in a single gulp. Then he started furiously lighting his pipe, with his face twitching.

“Yeeeah, we had a fine life once,” Forester mournfully said. “The bastards,” he added after a pause.

“There’s no point in telling him about it,” Memo suddenly said. “He doesn’t know what it’s like. He has no idea what it means—waiting for the next session every day…”

“All right,” said the broad-shouldered man. “He has no idea, so there’s nothing to talk about. Bird has spoken in his favor. Who else is for or against?”

Forester opened his mouth to speak, but Ordi got her word in first. “I want to explain why I’m for him. First, I trust him. I’ve already said that, but perhaps that’s not so important, because it only concerns me. But this man has abilities that could be useful to all of us. He can heal other people’s wounds as well as his own—and far better than you, Doc, no offense intended.”

“What kind of doctor am I?” asked Doc. “A mere forensic specialist…”

“But that’s still not all,” Ordi went on. “He can relieve the pain.”

“How do you mean?” Forester asked.

“I don’t know how he does it. He massages your temples and whispers something, and the pain passes off. It grabbed me twice at my mother’s place, and both times he helped me. The first time not a lot, but even so I didn’t pass out as usual. And the second time there was no pain at all.”

And immediately everything changed. Just a moment ago they had been judges, a moment ago they had thought they were deciding if he should live or die, but now the judges had disappeared and there remained only tormented, doomed people who suddenly felt hope. They looked at him as if they were expecting him to immediately, this very moment, take away this nightmare that had tormented them every minute, every day, and every night for years on end… Well now, Maxim thought, at least here I’ll be needed for healing and not for killing. But somehow the idea failed to bring him any satisfaction. The towers, he thought. How repulsive… Someone had to invent them. But you’d have to be a sadist to invent them…

“Can you really do that?” Doc asked.

“What?”

“Relieve the pain.”

“Relieve the pain… Yes.”

“How?”

“I can’t explain it to you. I don’t have enough words for that, and you don’t have enough knowledge… Surely you must have some medication, some kind of analgesic drugs?”

“No drugs are any help against this… Except perhaps a fatal dose.”

“Listen,” said Maxim. “Of course I’m prepared to alleviate the pain… I’ll do my best. But that’s not a solution. You have to look for some kind of large-scale remedy… Do you have any chemists?”

“We have everyone,” said the broad-shouldered man, “But this problem can’t be solved, Mak. If it could, the state prosecutor wouldn’t suffer the same torments as we do. He’d be certain to get hold of the medication. But now before every regular transmission he gets dead drunk and soaks in a hot bath.”

“The state prosecutor is a degenerate?” asked Maxim, bewildered.

“According to the rumors,” said the broad-shouldered man. “But we’ve gotten distracted. Have you finished, Bird? Who else wants to speak?”

“Wait, General,” said Forester. “So what do we have here? Doesn’t this mean that he can help us? Can you take away my pain?… Why, this man is absolutely priceless, I won’t let him out of this cellar! Begging your pardon, but the pains I get are absolutely unbearable… And maybe he’ll invent some kind of powders or something? You will invent some, won’t you, eh? Oh no, gentlemen and comrades, we have to take good care of this man…”

“So you’re ‘for,’ then?” General asked.

“I’m so much ‘for’ that if anyone lays a finger on him…”

“Clear enough. And you, Doc?”

“I would be ‘for’ even without this,” Doc growled, puffing on his pipe. “I have the same impression as Bird. He’s not one of us yet, but he will be—it can’t be any other way. He’s no good to them in any case. Too intelligent.”

“All right,” said General. “And you, Hoof?”

“I’m ‘for,’” said Memo. “He’s a useful man.”

“Well then,” said General. “I’m ‘for’ as well. I’m very glad for you, Mak. You’re a likable young guy, and I would have been sorry to kill you.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s eat,” he said. “There’s a transmission soon, and Mak can demonstrate his skill to us. Pour him some beer, Forester, and put some of that celebrated cheese of yours on the table. Hoof, you go and relieve Green—he hasn’t eaten since morning.”

10

General called the final consultation before the operation at the Castle of the Two-Headed Horse. This was the ruins of a museum outside of town that had been destroyed during the war. It was an isolated spot that the townsfolk didn’t visit, because of the close proximity of a malarial swamp, and it also had a bad reputation among the local people as a hangout for thieves and bandits. Maxim arrived on foot together with Ordi. Green arrived on a motorcycle and brought Forester with him. General and Memo/Hoof were already waiting for them in an old sewage pipe that opened directly into the swamp. General was smoking and the morose Memo was frenziedly waving away the mosquitoes with an incense stick.

“Did you bring it?” he asked Forester.

“Sure I did,” said Forester, tugging a tube of insect repellent out of his pocket. They all smeared themselves with it, and General opened the meeting.

Memo laid out a diagram and ran through the sequence of the operation once again. They already knew it all by heart. At one in the morning the group creeps up to the barbed wire entanglement from four sides and places the elongated demolition charges. Forester and Memo each act alone—from the north and the west, respectively. General and Ordi approach together from the east. Maxim and Green approach together from the south. The detonations take place simultaneously at precisely one in the morning, and immediately General, Green, Memo, and Forester dash through the gaps, their task being to run to the fortified bunker and attack it with grenades. As soon as the firing from the bunker stops or slackens off, Maxim and Ordi run up to the tower with magnetic mines and place them for detonation, having each first tossed another two grenades into the bunker to be on the safe side. Then they activate the detonators, collect the wounded—only the wounded!—and withdraw to the east through the forest to the road, where Tiny Tot will be waiting by a boundary marker with the motorcycle. The seriously wounded are loaded into the motorcycle; those who are lightly wounded or unhurt leave on foot. The assembly point is Forester’s little house. Wait at the assembly for no more than two hours, and then leave in the usual manner. Any questions? No. That’s all.

General tossed away his cigarette butt, reached inside his jacket, and took out a small bottle of yellow tablets. “Attention,” he said. “By decision of HQ the plan of the operation has been slightly changed. The commencement of the operation has been moved to twenty-two hundred hours.”

“Massaraksh!” said Memo. “What kind of news is this?”

“Don’t interrupt,” said General. “At precisely ten o’clock the evening transmission begins. Several seconds before that each one of us will take two of these tablets. After that everything follows the old plan, with one exception. Bird advances as a grenade thrower, together with me. Mak will have all the mines—he’ll blow up the tower alone.”

“How’s that?” Forester pensively asked, examining the diagram. “I can’t understand this at all. Twenty-two hundred—that’s the evening session… I’m sorry, but once I lie down, I won’t get back up, I’ll just be lying flat out… I’m sorry, but you won’t pry me back up with a stake.”

“Just a moment,” said General. “I repeat once again. At ten seconds to ten, everyone takes this painkiller. Do you understand, Forester? You’ll take a painkiller. So by ten o’clock—”

“I know those pills,” said Forester. “Two short minutes of relief, and then you get completely tied in knots… We know, we’ve tried them.”

“These are new pills,” General patiently said. “They act for up to five minutes. We’ll have time to run up to the bunker and fling our grenades, and Mak will do the rest.”

Silence fell. They were thinking. Slow-witted Forester rummaged in his hair with a scraping sound, biting on his lower lip. They could see the idea slowly getting through to him. He started rapidly blinking, left his hair in peace, and looked around at them all with a glance of realization, suddenly coming to life, and slapping himself on the knees. Forester was a marvelous, good-hearted fellow, who had been slashed and scarred from head to foot by life but still hadn’t learned anything about life. He didn’t need anything and he didn’t want anything, except to be left in peace and allowed to go back to his family and plant beets. He had spent the war in the trenches and had been less afraid of atomic shells than he was of his own corporal, a countryman just like him, but a very cunning man, and a great villain. Now Forester had taken a great liking to Maxim and felt eternally grateful to him for healing an old fistula on his shin, and ever since that, he had believed that as long as Maxim was there, nothing bad could happen to him. For the last month Maxim had spent the night in Forester’s cellar, and every time they went to bed, Forester told Maxim a story, the same story every time, but with different endings: “There was this toad that lived in a swamp, a great fool he was, so stupid nobody could even believe it, and then this fool got into the habit…” Maxim simply couldn’t imagine Forester involved in bloody work, although he’d been told that Forester was a skillful and merciless fighter.

“The new plan has the following advantages,” said General. “First, they don’t expect us at that time. The advantage of surprise. Second, the previous plan was devised a long time ago, and there’s a quite real danger that the enemy already knows about it. This way we get a head start on the enemy. The probability of success is increased…”

Green kept nodding in approval all the time. His predatory face glowed in malicious satisfaction, and his long, nimble fingers kept clenching and opening. He liked all kinds of surprises and loved anything risky. His past life was obscure. He was a thief and, apparently, a killer, a child of the dark postwar years: an orphan and a hooligan, raised by thieves, fed by thieves, and thrashed by thieves. He had served time in jail and escaped—brazenly and unexpectedly, as he did everything—and tried to go back to his thieves’ gang, but times had changed, his cronies wouldn’t tolerate a degenerate, and they wanted to hand him in. But he fought them off and escaped again, hiding out in villages until the late Gel Ketshef found him.

Green was a smart young guy with a lively imagination: he believed the earth was flat and the sky was solid, and precisely because of his naive ignorance, stimulated by his turbulent fantasy, he was the only person on this inhabited island who suspected that Maxim was not some kind of Highlander (“I’ve seen these Highlanders, I’ve seen all their different varieties”) or some strange trick of nature (“Nature made us all the same, the ones in jail and the ones on the outside”) but actually an alien from impossible places, like somewhere beyond the heavenly firmament. He had never openly spoken about this to Maxim, but he had hinted at it, and he regarded Maxim with respect bordering on obsequiousness. “You’ll be our boss,” he kept repeating. “And then I’ll spread my wings under you…”

How and where exactly he intended to spread his wings remained entirely obscure, but one thing was clear: Green really loved any risky business and he couldn’t stand any kind of work. And another thing that Maxim didn’t like about him was his wild and barbaric cruelty. He was a genuine spotted monkey, only domesticated and trained to hunt armored wolves.

“I don’t like it,” Memo morosely said. “It’s a reckless gamble. No preparations, no checks… No, I don’t like it.”

He never liked anything, this Memo Gramenu, nicknamed Hoof of Death. He was never satisfied with anything, and he was always afraid of something. His past was kept secret, because at first he had held an extremely high position in the underground. And then one day he had fallen into the hands of the gendarmes and survived only by a miracle—crippled by torture, he had been dragged out by his cellmates, who had set up an escape. After that, in accordance with the laws of the underground, he had been removed from HQ general staff, although he hadn’t aroused any suspicions. He had been appointed as Gel Ketshef’s deputy, taken part in two attacks on towers, personally destroyed several patrol vehicles, tracked down the commander of one of the brigades of Battle Guards and shot him in person, and was known as an individual of fanatical courage and an excellent machine gunner.

He had been about to be appointed the leader of a group in a small town in the southwest, but then Gel’s group had been taken. Hoof still didn’t arouse any suspicions; he was even appointed the leader of the new group. But all the time he fancied that he sensed sideways glances that might not even exist but could easily have existed: in the underground they weren’t fond of people who were too lucky. Memo was taciturn and fastidious; he had a thorough knowledge of the science of clandestine activity and demanded unconditional obedience of all his rules, even the most insignificant. He never discussed general matters with anyone, dealing only with the business of the group, and he made sure that the group had everything: weapons, food, money, a good network of safe houses, and even a motorcycle.

He disliked Maxim. Maxim could sense that, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t want to ask; Memo wasn’t the kind of person you could enjoy a frank conversation with. Perhaps it was all simply because Maxim was the only one who could sense Memo’s constant fear—the others could never even have imagined that the morose Hoof of Death, who spoke on familiar, casual terms with any representative of HQ, one of the founders of the underground, and a terrorist to the marrow of his bones, could possibly be afraid of anything.

“I don’t understand the HQ’s reasoning,” Memo went on, smearing a new dollop of insect repellent on his neck with a grimace of disgust. “I’ve known this plan for a dog’s age. We were about to try it a hundred times, and we rejected it a hundred times, because it means almost certain death. While there’s no radiation, if things go badly, at least we still have a chance of slipping away and striking again somewhere else. This way, if just one thing goes wrong, we’re all done for.”

“You’re not entirely right, Hoof,” Ordi objected. “We have Mak now. If something does go wrong, he’ll be able to drag us out, and he might even manage to blow up the tower.”

She was lazily smoking and looking into the distance, toward the swamp, cool and calm, not showing any surprise, and ready for anything. She made people feel timid, because she saw them only as more or less efficient means of destruction. She was all there in plain sight—there were no dark or hazy patches, either in her past, or her present, or her future. She came from an intellectual family; her father had been killed in the war, and her mother still worked even now as a teacher in Utki Village. Ordi herself had worked as a teacher until she was thrown out of the school because she was a degenerate. She went into hiding, tried to flee to Hontia, and ran into Gel at the border as he was bringing in weapons. He had made her into a terrorist.

At first she had worked out of purely ideological motivation—she was fighting for a just society in which everyone was free to think and to do whatever he wanted to do and was capable of doing—but seven years ago the gendarmes had picked up her trail and taken her child hostage, in an attempt to force her to surrender and turn her husband in. HQ had forbidden her to turn herself in, because she knew too much. She had never heard anything more about her child and regarded him as dead, although privately she didn’t believe that, and for seven years now she had been primarily motivated by hate. Hate came first, followed by the substantially dimmed dream of a just society. She had taken the loss of her husband incredibly calmly, although she loved him very much. Probably she had simply become accustomed, long before his arrest, to the idea that you shouldn’t cling too tightly to anything in this world. And now, like Gel at the trial, she was a living corpse, but a very dangerous corpse.

“Mak’s a greenhorn,” Memo morosely said. “Who can guarantee that he won’t lose his head when he’s left on his own? It’s absurd to count on it. It’s absurd to abandon the old, well-thought-through plan, just because we now have the greenhorn Mak. As I’ve already said, this is a reckless gamble.”

“Ah, come off it, boss,” said Green. “That’s what our work’s like. If you ask me, old plan or new plan—it’s all just a reckless gamble. How could it be anything else? You can’t do it without any risk, and with these pills, there’s less risk. They’ll go crazy down there under the tower when we pounce on them at ten o’clock. At ten o’clock they’re probably drinking vodka and singing songs, and we’ll pounce on them, and maybe their rifles aren’t even loaded and they’re all sprawled around drunk… No, I like it. Right, Mak?”

“And I, you know, like it too,” said Forester. “The way I reckon it is, if this plan surprises me, it’ll absolutely amaze the Battle Guards. Green’s right when he says they’ll go crazy… Anyway, we’ll get an extra five minutes without agony, and after that we’ll see… If Mak brings down the tower, everything will be fine altogether… Oh, won’t it be fine!” he suddenly exclaimed, as if struck by a new idea. “No one before us has ever brought down a tower, have they? They’ve only bragged about doing it, but we’ll be the first… And then, while they’re fixing this tower up again—think how long it’ll take! We can live like human beings for a month at least… without these rotten, lousy fits…”

“I’m afraid you have misunderstood me, Hoof,” said General. “Nothing in the plan changes. We simply make our attack unexpectedly, strengthening it by using Bird and somewhat changing the procedure of withdrawal.”

“And if you’re afraid Mak won’t be able to drag us all out,” Ordi said in the same lazy voice, still gazing at the swamp, “don’t forget that he’ll only have to drag out one, or two of us at the most, and he’s a strong boy.”

“Yes,” said General, looking at her. “That’s true…”

General was in love with Ordi. No one saw it apart from Maxim, but Maxim could tell that it was an old, hopeless love, which had begun when Gel was alive, and had now become even more hopeless, if that was possible.

General wasn’t a general. Before the war he had been a worker on an assembly line, then he had ended up in a training college for junior officers and fought in the war as a corporal, finishing it as a cornet. He knew Cornet Chachu very well and had scores to settle with him (following disturbances in a certain regiment immediately after the war). General had been hunting Chachu without any success for a long time. He was a member of underground HQ staff but often took part in practical operations, being a good soldier and a knowledgeable commander. He liked working in the underground, although he didn’t have any real idea of what would happen after the victory was won.

But then, he didn’t really believe in the victory. As a born soldier, he easily adapted to any circumstances and never tried to think more than ten to twelve days ahead. He didn’t have any ideas of his own—he had picked up a few things from the one-handed man and borrowed a few things from Ketshef, and a few things had been planted in his mind at HQ, but the most important things still remained what had been hammered into his head at the junior officers’ college. So when he theorized, he produced a strange mixture of ideas: the power of the rich has to be overthrown (that was from one-handed Wild Boar, who was evidently something like a socialist or communist); engineers and technicians should be put in charge of the state (that came from Ketshef); cities should be razed to the ground and we should live in harmony with nature (some bucolic philosopher at HQ); and all of this could only be achieved by absolute obedience to the orders of senior commanders and a bit less idle chatter on abstract subjects.

Maxim had clashed with him twice. It was absolutely impossible to understand what point there was in demolishing the towers, losing brave comrades and wasting time, funds, and weapons in the process, if a tower would be restored anyway and everything would carry on as it had been before, except that the population of the local villages would be convinced by the evidence of their own eyes what heinous devils these degenerates were. General had not been able to give Maxim an adequate justification for sabotage activity. Either he was hiding something or he himself didn’t understand what it was needed for, but he had repeated the same thing over and over every time: orders are not subject to discussion, every attack on a tower is a blow struck at the enemy, people must not be prevented from becoming actively engaged, otherwise their hate will fester inside them and they will have nothing at all to live for…

“We need to look for the center!” Maxim had insisted. “We need to strike directly at the center, with all our forces at once! What kind of heads do they have in this HQ of yours if they don’t understand a simple thing like that?”

“HQ knows what it’s doing,” General had gravely replied, thrusting out his chin and jerking his eyebrows up high. “In our situation, discipline comes first, and let’s not have any freebooting peasant anarchy. Everything in its own good time, Mak—you’ll get your center, if you live that long…” However, he regarded Mak with respect and gladly made use of his services when the radiation attacks caught him in Forester’s cellar.

“All the same, I’m against it,” Memo stubbornly said. “What if they just shoot us down? What if we don’t manage it in five minutes and we need six? The plan’s crazy. And it always was crazy.”

“It’s the first time we’ve used demolition charges,” said General, tearing his eyes away from Ordi with an effort. “But even if we take the previous means of breaking through the wire, then the fate of the operation is already decided on average after three or four minutes. If we catch them by surprise, we’ll have one or even two minutes in reserve.”

“Two minutes is a lot of time,” said Forester. “In two minutes I’ll strangle all of them in there with my bare hands. Just as long as I can get all the way there.”

“Getting there… yeeaah,” Green drawled in a strange, balefully pensive voice.

“Don’t you want to say anything, Mak?” General asked.

“I’ve already said what I think,” said Maxim. “The new plan’s better than the old one, but it’s still bad. Let me do it all myself. Take the risk.”

“We won’t talk about that,” General replied in annoyance. “There’s no more to be said. Do you have any practical comments?”

“No,” said Maxim. He already regretted having brought up the subject again.

“Where did the new tablets come from?” Memo suddenly asked.

“They’re the old tablets,” said General. “Mak managed to improve them a bit.”

“Ah, Mak… So this is his idea?”

Hoof said it in a tone of voice that made everyone feel awkward. The words could be understood like this: A greenhorn, not really one of us, and a crossover from the other side—so doesn’t the whole business have the whiff of an ambush? There have been cases like that…

“No,” General abruptly snapped. “It’s HQ’s idea. So kindly comply, Hoof.”

“I am complying,” Memo said with a shrug. “I’m against it, but I’m complying anyway. What else can I do?”

Maxim sadly looked at them all sitting there in front of him, all very different from each other. In ordinary circumstances, the idea of gathering together would never even have occurred to them: a former farmer, a former criminal, a former teacher… They had only one thing in common: they had been declared enemies of society, for some idiotic reason they were detested by everybody, and the entire, immense state apparatus of oppression was directed against them.

What they were about to do was senseless; in just a few hours’ time, most of them would be dead, but nothing in the world would change, and nothing would change for those who were left alive. In the best case they would have a brief respite from their hellish torments, but they would be lacerated with wounds and exhausted by fleeing from pursuit, they would be hunted with dogs, they would have to lie low in foul-smelling burrows, and then everything would start all over again. Making common cause with them was stupid, but abandoning them would be a shabby trick, so he had to choose the stupid option. And maybe no other way was possible here, with them, and if he wanted to get something done, he would have to put up with the stupidity and the pointless bloodshed, or just maybe he would have to go through with the shabby trick. A pitiful individual… a stupid individual… a shabby individual… But what else could you expect from a human being in a pitiful, stupid, shabby world like this?

He just had to remember that stupidity was a consequence of powerlessness, and powerlessness derived from ignorance, from not knowing the true path… But surely it wasn’t possible that no true path could be found among a thousand paths? I’ve already followed one path, thought Maxim, and it was a false path. Now I have to follow this one to the end, even though I can already see that it’s a false path too. And maybe I’m fated to follow even more false paths and find myself in dead ends. But who am I trying to justify myself to? he thought. And what for? I like them, I can help them, and for today that’s all I need to know.

“We’ll split up now,” said General. “Hoof goes with Forester, Mak goes with Green, and I go with Bird. Rendezvous at nine o’clock on the dot at the boundary marker. Only make your way through the forest, no roads. The pairs must not split up. Each person is responsible for the other. Off you go now. Memo and Forester leave first.” He gathered up all the cigarette butts onto a sheet of paper, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.

Forester rubbed his knees. “My bones are aching,” he announced. “That means a spot of rain. It’s going to be a good night, dark…”

11

They had to crawl from the edge of the forest to the wire. Green crawled in front, dragging the pole with the demolition charge on it and swearing under his breath at the prickles jabbing into his skin. Maxim crawled after him, clutching a sack of magnetic mines. The sky was veiled in dark clouds, and it was drizzling. The grass was wet, so they got soaked through in the first few minutes, and they couldn’t see anything through the rain. Green crawled along by the line of the compass, without deviating even once—he was an experienced man, all right. Then Maxim caught an acrid odor of wet rust and saw three rows of barbed wire, and beyond the wire was the vague latticework bulk of the tower. When he raised his head he could make out a squat structure with rectangular outlines at its base; that was the fortified bunker, and there were three battle guards with a machine gun inside it. Indistinct voices reached him through the rustling of the rain, and then a candle was lit inside, and a weak yellow light illuminated the long embrasure.

Still cursing under his breath, Green shoved his pole in under the wire. “All set,” he whispered. “Crawl away.” They crawled about ten steps away and started waiting. Green clutched the detonator lead in his hand and looked at the glowing hands of his watch. He was shaking. Maxim could hear his teeth chattering and his constrained breathing. Maxim was shaking too. He stuck his hand into the bag and touched the mines—they felt rough and cold. The rain grew stronger, and now its rustling drowned out all other sounds. Green got up on all fours. He kept whispering something all the time, either praying or cursing.

“Right, you bastards!” he suddenly said in a loud voice, making an abrupt movement with his right hand. A piston clicked and there was a hissing sound, up ahead of them a sheet of red flame erupted from under the ground, and another broad sheet soared up far away on their left. They felt a sudden blow on their ears, and then hot, wet earth, clumps of decaying grass, and red-hot pieces of something came showering down. Green went hurtling forward, shouting out in a strange voice, and suddenly everything turned as bright as day, even brighter than day, blindingly bright. Maxim squeezed his eyes shut, feeling himself turn cold inside, and a thought briefly flitted through his mind—Everything’s lost—but there weren’t any shots, the silence continued, and he couldn’t hear anything except for rustling and hissing.

When Maxim opened his eyes, through the blinding light he could make out the gray bunker, a wide gap in the wire, and figures looking very small and isolated in the huge empty space around the tower—they were running as fast as they could toward the bunker, running silently, without speaking, stumbling and falling, jumping up again and running. Then Maxim heard a pitiful moan, and he saw Green, who wasn’t running anywhere but sitting on the ground just beyond the wire, swaying to and fro with his head clutched in his hands. Maxim dashed over to him, tore his hands away from his face, and saw his rolled-back eyes and bubbles of saliva on his lips… But there still weren’t any shots; an eternity had gone by, and the bunker still remained silent. Then suddenly the familiar battle march thundered out.

Maxim flung the bungling blockhead onto his back and fumbled in his own pocket with one hand, feeling glad that General was so cagey, he had given Maxim some extra pain pills just to be on the safe side. He forced open Green’s mouth, which was locked shut by cramp, and thrust the pills deep into the black hole of his wheezing throat. Then he grabbed Green’s rifle and swung around, looking to see where the light was coming from and why there was so much of it—there shouldn’t be so much light…

There still weren’t any shots, and the isolated figures were still running. One of them was already very close to the bunker, another was a little way behind, and a third, running from the right, suddenly fell, moving at full speed, and went tumbling head over heels. “When Guards appear upon the battle scene…” they roared in the bunker, while the light continued to beat down from a height of about ten yards—probably from the tower, which was impossible to make out now. Maxim could see five or six blinding blue-white disks; he flung up the automatic rifle and squeezed the trigger, and the homemade weapon, small, awkward, and unfamiliar, jerked hard in his hands. As if in reply, red flashes glinted in the embrasure of the bunker, and the rifle was suddenly torn out of his hands. Maxim still hadn’t hit a single one of the blinding disks, and now Green had grabbed the rifle; he set off, rushing forward, and immediately fell, stumbling on level ground.

Then Maxim lay down and crawled back to his bag. Behind him automatics frantically crackled, a machine gun roared with a terrifying, hollow sound, and then—at long last!—a grenade burst, then another, and then two together, and the machine gun fell silent. Now there were only automatics chattering, and then came the bursts of more explosions, and then someone shrieked in an inhuman voice and it went quiet. Maxim grabbed the bag and ran. Smoke was rising in a column above the bunker; the air smelled of burning and gunpowder. And everything all around it was bright and empty, with only a black, hunched-over figure groping his way along right beside the bunker, clinging to the wall. The figure reached the embrasure, tossed something into it, and dropped to the ground. The embrasure suddenly lit up with red light, Maxim heard a popping sound, and everything went quiet again…

Maxim stumbled and almost fell. A few steps farther on he stumbled again, and then he noticed that there were little stakes jutting up out of the ground—short, thick stakes hidden in the grass. So that’s it… That how things are here… If General had sent me in alone, I’d have immediately smashed both my legs, and now I’d be lying there, stretched out dead on these repulsive little stakes… You boaster… You stupid ignoramus… The tower was really close now. He ran, looking down at his feet; he was alone, and he didn’t want to think about the others.

He ran up to a huge iron support and dropped the bag. He badly wanted to slap a heavy, rough pancake onto the wet iron immediately, but there was still the bunker… The iron door was ajar, with lazy tongues of flames flicking out of it, and a guardsman was lying on the steps—it was all over there. Maxim set off around the bunker and found General, who was sitting slumped against the concrete wall. His eyes were blank, and Maxim realized that the tablets had already stopped working. He looked around, picked General up in his arms, and carried him away from the tower. About twenty paces away Ordi was lying in the grass with a grenade in her hand. She was lying facedown, but Maxim immediately realized that she was dead. He started looking farther and found Forester, also dead. And Green had been killed too—there was no one for him to leave General with.

He walked across the open space, casting multiple black shadows, stunned by all these deaths even though a minute earlier he had thought he was prepared for them, feeling an impatient urge to go back and blow up the tower in order to finish what they had begun, but first he had to see how Hoof was. He found Memo right beside the wire. He was wounded, and had probably tried to crawl away toward the wire before he collapsed, unconscious. Maxim put General beside him and started running toward the tower again. It was strange to think that now he could cross these miserable two hundred yards without being afraid of anything.

He started attaching the mines to the supports, two on each one to make sure. He hurried, although there was plenty of time—but General was losing blood, and Memo was losing blood, and somewhere trucks carrying Battle Guards were already hurtling along the highway, and Gai had been roused from his bed by the alarm, and now he was jarring over the cobblestones beside Pandi, and in the nearby villages the people had already woken up; the men were grabbing guns and axes, the children were crying, and the women were cursing the bloodthirsty spies who robbed them of their sleep and their peace. Maxim could feel the drizzly darkness all around him with every pore of his skin, sense it slowly stirring, coming to life, becoming menacing and dangerous…

The detonators were set for five minutes’ delay; he activated them all, one by one, and ran back, toward General and Memo. Something was bothering him; he stopped, looked around, and realized what it was: Ordi. He ran back to her, looking down at his feet in order not to stumble, lifted the light body up onto his shoulder, and started running again, looking down at his feet—toward the wire, toward the gray gap where General and Memo were suffering agony, but they wouldn’t have to suffer much longer now. He stopped beside them and turned back toward the tower.

And then the underground terrorists’ nonsensical dream came true. Rapidly, one after another, the mines detonated, the base of the tower was enveloped in smoke, and then the blinding lights went out, everything went pitch black, and the darkness was filled with scraping and rumbling, the earth shook and bounced with a metallic clang, and then it shook again.

Maxim looked at his watch. It was seventeen minutes past ten. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he could see the ripped-apart wire again, and he could see the tower. It was lying to one side of the bunker, in which everything was still burning, and its supports, mangled and twisted by the explosions, were haphazardly jutting out.

“Who’s there?” wheezed General, starting to stir.

“It’s me,” said Maxim. He leaned down. ‘”It’s time to leave. Where are you hit? Can you walk?”

“Wait,” said General. “What about the tower?”

“The tower’s finished,” said Maxim. Ordi was lying over his shoulder, and he didn’t know how to tell General about her.

“I can’t believe it,” said General, sitting up. “Massaraksh! Is it really true?” he laughed and lay down again. “Listen, Mak, I can’t gather my wits… What time is it?”

“Ten twenty.”

“So everything was right! We took it out… Well done, Mak. Wait, who’s this here beside me?”

“Hoof,” said Mak.

“He’s breathing,” said General. “Wait, who else is still alive? Who’s that you have there?”

“It’s Ordi,” said Maxim, struggling to force the words out.

General said nothing for a few seconds. “Ordi,” he hesitantly repeated, and got up, staggering on his feet. “Ordi,” he repeated again, and laid his palm on her cheek.

They both said nothing for a while. Then Memo asked in a hoarse voice, “What time is it?”

“Ten twenty-two,” said Maxim.

“Where are we?” Memo asked.

“We have to go,” said Maxim.

General turned around and set off through the gap in the wire, staggering very badly. Then Maxim leaned down, threw corpulent Memo across his other shoulder, and set off after General. He caught up with him, and General stopped.

“Only the wounded,” he said.

“I can get her there,” said Maxim.

“Follow orders,” said General. “Only the wounded.”

He reached out his hands and, groaning with pain, lifted Ordi’s body off Maxim’s shoulder. He couldn’t hold her up and immediately put her down on the ground.

“Only the wounded,” he said in a strange voice. “On the double… march!”

“Where are we?” asked Memo. “Who’s here? Where are we?”

“Hold on to my belt,” Maxim told General, and started running.

Memo shrieked and went limp. His head dangled, his arms dangled, and his legs pounded against Maxim’s back. General ran close on Maxim’s heels, breathing loudly and hoarsely and holding on to his belt.

They ran into the forest and wet branches lashed at Maxim’s face. He dodged away from trees that came dashing toward him and jumped over tree stumps that leaped up in front of him. It was harder than he had expected—he was no longer the same man, and the air here wasn’t right, and in general nothing here was right, everything was wrong and nonsensical.

They left broken bushes and a trail of blood behind them, and the roads had been cordoned off long ago, the dogs were straining at their leashes, and Cornet Chachu, with his pistol in his hand, was croaking commands as he ran pigeon-toed across the asphalt, soared over the roadside ditch, and was the first to dive into the forest. They left the idiotic toppled tower and the burned battle guards behind them, together with three dead comrades, already stiff. And here he had two badly wounded, half-dead men with almost no chance of making it—and all for the sake of one tower, one idiotic, pointless, dirty, rusty tower, one of thousands exactly the same… I’ll never let anyone do anything so stupid again. No, I’ll say. I’ve already seen that. All that blood, and all for a heap of useless, rusty iron; one young, stupid life for rusty iron; and one old, stupid life for the pitiful hope of living like other people at least for a few days; and one love shot down, not even for iron, and not even for hope. If you simply want to survive, I’ll say, then why do you die, die so cheaply? Massaraksh, I won’t allow them to die, I’ll get them to live, they’ll learn how to live! What a blockhead—how could I do it, how could I let them do it?

He darted out headlong onto the country road, holding Memo on his shoulder and dragging General along under his arm. Tiny Tot, soaking wet and smelling of sweat and fear, was already running toward him from the boundary marker.

“Is this everyone?” he asked in horror, and Maxim felt grateful to him for that horror.

They dragged the wounded men to the motorcycle, squeezed Memo into the sidecar, and sat General on the rear saddle; Tiny Tot lashed General to him with his belt. The forest was still quiet, but Maxim knew that didn’t mean anything.

“Get going,” he said. “Don’t stop, just break through.”

“I know,” said Tiny Tot. “What about you?”

“I’ll try to distract them. Don’t worry, I’ll get away.”

“Some chance…” Tiny Tot said in an anguished voice, and jerked the starter; the motorcycle sputtered to life. “Did you blow up the tower at least?” he shouted.

“Yes,” Maxim said, and Tiny Tot went racing away.

Left alone, Maxim stood there without moving for a few seconds, then dashed back into the forest. At the first clearing he came across, he tore off his jacket and flung it into the bushes. Then he ran back to the road and ran along it for a while as fast as he could go in the direction of the town, stopped, unclipped the grenades off his belt, scattered them across the road, and started scrambling through the bushes on the other side, trying to break as many branches as possible. He dropped his handkerchief behind the bushes, and only then ran off through the forest, shifting into the smooth, rhythmical hunting stride in which he would have to cover five or ten miles.

He ran without thinking about anything, except for making sure that he didn’t deviate too much from a southwesterly direction, and carefully choosing where he set down his feet. He crossed roads twice—the first was a deserted country road, and the second was the Resort Highway, which was also empty, but he heard dogs there for the first time. He couldn’t tell what kind of dogs they were, but to be on the safe side he gave them a very wide berth, and an hour and a half later found himself among the freight sheds of the city’s rail yard.

Here there were lights shining, steam locomotives mournfully whistling, and people darting about. Here probably nobody knew anything, but he couldn’t run any more—he might be taken for a thief. He switched to a walk, and when a heavy freight train ponderously rumbled by on its way into the city, he leaped up onto the first flatcar carrying a load of sand, lay down, and rode like that all the way to the concrete plant, where he jumped down, dusted off the sand, lightly smeared his hands with heavy fuel oil, and started thinking about what to do next.

There was no point in making his way to Forester’s place, and that was the only safe house in the vicinity. He could try spending the night in Utki Village, but that was dangerous—that address was known to Cornet Chachu—and apart from that, Maxim was afraid even to think of showing up at old Illy’s house and telling her that her daughter was dead. He had nowhere to go.

He went into a decrepit little night tavern for workers, ate a few sausages, drank some beer, and dozed for a while, slumped against the wall. Everybody here was as dirty and tired as he was; they were workers who had finished their shift and missed the last streetcar. He dreamed about Rada, and in his dream he thought that Gai was probably in the dragnet right now, and that was good. But Rada loved him and she would take him in, let him change his clothes and get washed; his civilian suit should still be there, the same one that Fank had given him… and in the morning he could leave and go east, to where the second safe house he knew was located… He woke up, paid his bill, and walked out.

It was only a short walk and not dangerous. There was nobody on the streets, and the only person he encountered was the janitor right there at the house. He was sitting on his stool in the entrance passage and sleeping. Maxim cautiously walked past him, went up the stairs, and rang the way he always used to ring. At first it was quiet on the other side of the door, then something scraped, he heard steps, and the door slightly opened. He saw Rada.

The only reason she didn’t cry out was that she choked and squeezed her mouth shut with her hand. Maxim took her in his arms and kissed her on the forehead; he felt as if he had come back home, to a place where they had long ago stopped expecting him. He closed the door behind him, they quietly walked through into the room, and Rada suddenly started crying. Everything in the room was still the same as before, except that his camp cot was gone, and Gai was sitting up on the sofa bed in his nightshirt, gaping wide-eyed at Maxim with an expression of wild amazement. Several seconds went by like that, with Maxim and Gai looking at each other, and Rada crying.

“Massaraksh,” Gai eventually said in a helpless voice. “You’re alive? You’re not dead?”

“Hello, old buddy,” said Maxim. “It’s a pity you’re home. I didn’t want to land you in trouble. If you tell me to, I’ll leave straightaway.”

At that Rada took a tight grip on his arm. “You’re not going anywhere!” she said in a throttled voice. “Not for anything! You’re not going… Just let him try… Then I’ll go too… I won’t care…”

Gai flung off his blanket, lowered his feet down off the sofa-bed, and walked up to Maxim. He touched Maxim on the shoulders and the arms, getting engine oil smeared on his hands, then rubbed his forehead and smeared that too. “I don’t understand a thing,” he said in a plaintive voice. “You’re alive… Where have you come from? Rada, stop bawling… You’re not wounded? You look terrible… And there’s blood here…”

“It’s not mine,” said Maxim.

“I don’t understand a thing,” Gai repeated. “Listen, you’re alive! Rada, heat up some water. Wake up that old fogy, tell him to give us some vodka—”

“Quiet,” said Maxim. “Don’t make a noise, they’re hunting me!”

“Who? What for? What nonsense… Rada, let him get changed!… Mak, sit down, sit down… or maybe you want to lie down? How did this happen? Why are you still alive?”

Maxim cautiously sat down on the edge of the bed, put his hands on his knees to avoid smearing oil on anything, and looked at these two people. Looking at them for the last time as his friends, and even feeling a strange kind of curiosity about what would happen next, he said, “I’m a state criminal now, folks. I’ve just blown up a tower.”

He wasn’t surprised that they immediately understood him and instantly realized what kind of tower he meant, without having to ask. Rada only clenched her hands together, without taking her eyes off him. Gai grunted and scratched his head with both hands in the ancestral family gesture, looked away, and said in an irked voice, “You blockhead. So you decided to take revenge… Take revenge on whom? Ah, you, you’re the same crazy weirdo you always were. A little kid… OK, you didn’t say anything, and we didn’t hear anything… I don’t want to hear anything. Rada, go and heat up some water. And don’t make any noise in there, don’t wake people up… Take your clothes off,” he told Maxim in a severe voice. “You’re as filthy as hell, where on earth did you get to?”

Maxim got up and started getting undressed. He took off his dirty, wet shirt (Gai gave a loud gulp when he saw the scars from the bullets) and tugged off his repulsively filthy boots and trousers with an air of disgust. All his clothes were covered in black blotches, and Maxim felt relieved to be free of them.

“Well, that’s great,” he said, and sat down again. “Thanks, Gai. I won’t stay long, only until the morning, and then I’ll go.”

“Did the janitor see you?” Gai morosely asked.

“He was sleeping.”

“Sleeping…” Gai dubiously repeated. “You know, he… Well, of course, maybe he was sleeping. He does sleep sometimes.”

“Why are you home?” Maxim asked.

“I’m on leave.”

“What kind of leave could you be on?” asked Maxim. “The entire corps of guards is probably out in the country right now…”

“But I’m not a guardsman any longer,” Gai said with a crooked grin. “They threw me out of the Guards, Mak. I’m just a simple army corporal now—I teach peasant hicks which leg is the right one and which is the left one. Once I’ve taught them, off they go to the Hontian border, into the trenches… That’s how things are with me now, Mak.”

“Is that because of me?” Maxim asked in a quiet voice.

“Well, what can I say? Basically, yes.”

They looked at each other, and Gai turned his eyes away. Maxim suddenly thought that if Gai turned him in, he would probably get back into the Guards and his correspondence school for officers, and he also thought that only two months ago a thought like that couldn’t possibly have occurred to him. He suddenly had a bad feeling and wanted to leave immediately, this very moment, but at that point Rada came back and summoned him to the bathroom. While he was getting washed up, she prepared something to eat and warmed up some tea. Gai sat in the same place with his cheeks propped on his fists and a melancholy expression on his face. He didn’t ask any questions—no doubt he was afraid of hearing something terrible, something so bad that it would rupture his last line of defense and sever the final threads that still connected him to Maxim. And Rada didn’t ask any questions either; no doubt she simply wasn’t interested in questions. She never took her eyes off Maxim or let go of his hands, and occasionally sobbed—she was afraid that he would suddenly disappear, this man she loved. Disappear and never appear again. And then, because there wasn’t much time left, Maxim pushed away his unfinished cup of tea and started telling them everything himself.

About how he had been helped by the mother of a state criminal; about how he had met degenerates; about who they—the degenerates—really were, why they were degenerates and what the towers were, what a diabolical, abominable invention the towers were. About what had happened that night, how people had run at a machine gun and died one after another, about how that odious heap of wet iron had collapsed, and how he had carried a dead woman, whose child had been taken away, and whose husband had been killed…

Rada avidly listened, and Gai eventually became interested too. He even started asking questions—malicious and spiteful questions, stupid and cruel questions, and Maxim realized that he didn’t believe anything, that the very idea of the Unknown Fathers’ perfidy simply slid off his mind, like water off grease, that he didn’t like listening to all of this and was struggling to hold himself back and not interrupt Maxim. And when Maxim had finished his story, he said with a dark chuckle, “Well, they certainly wound you around their little finger!”

Maxim looked at Rada, but she turned her eyes away, biting on her lip, and indecisively said, “I don’t know… Of course, maybe there was one tower like that. You come across villains even in the city council… and the Fathers simply don’t know about it… Nobody tells them about it, and they don’t know… You must understand, Mak, it simply can’t be the way you tell it… Those are ballistic defense towers, you know…”

She spoke in a quiet, swooning voice, obviously trying not to offend him, beseechingly glancing into his eyes and stroking his shoulder, but Gai suddenly flew into a rage and started saying that all of this was stupid, that Maxim simply had no idea how many of those towers there were right across the country, how many of them were built every year and every day, and how, he asked, could such vast billions possibly be spent in our poor state, simply in order to cause trouble twice a day for a pitiful little group of degenerates, who in and of themselves amounted to nothing, a mere drop in the ocean of the people… “And so much money is spent simply on guarding them,” he added after a pause.

“I’ve thought about that,” said Maxim. “Probably everything really isn’t all that simple. But Hontian money has nothing to do with it… And then, I saw it for myself: as soon as the tower collapsed, they all started feeling better. And as for antiballistic defense… You have to understand, Gai, that there are simply too many towers for defense against attack from the air. Nowhere near as many as that are needed to close off airspace… And then, why have ADTs on the southern border? Do the wild degenerates really have ballistic weapons?”

“There are plenty of things down there,” Gai waspishly said. “You don’t know anything, and you believe everything. I’m sorry, Mak, but if you weren’t you… We’re all too trusting,” he added in a bitter tone of voice.

Maxim didn’t want to argue anymore, or to speak about this subject at all. He started asking how life was treating them, where Rada was working, why she hadn’t gone to study, how their uncle was, and the neighbors… Rada livened up and started telling him, then she checked herself, collected the dirty dishes, and went out to the kitchen. Gai briskly scratched his head with both hands, frowned at the dark window, made his mind up, and launched into a serious man-to-man conversation.

“We love you,” he said. “I love you, and Rada loves you, although you’re an unsettled kind of man, and because of you everything has gone kind of awry for us. But the real problem is this. Rada doesn’t just simply love you, not like that, you understand… but, how can I put it… basically, you understand, she’s really devoted to you, she spent all this time crying, and for the first week she was actually ill. She’s a good girl and a good homemaker, lots of men admire her, and that’s not surprising… I don’t know how you feel about her, but what would I advise you to do? Give up all this nonsense. It’s not for you, you’re out of your depth, they’ll get you embroiled, you’ll get killed yourself, and you’ll spoil the lives of many innocent people—that doesn’t make any sense. You just go back up into your mountains and find your own people. You won’t find the place with your head, but your heart will tell you where your homeland is… Nobody will look for you there, you’ll settle down, rebuild your life, then come back and collect Rada, and you’ll both be happy there. Or maybe, by that time we’ll be finished with the Hontians, peace will come at last, and we’ll start living like normal people.”

Maxim listened to him and thought that if he really were a Highlander, that was probably what he would do: I’d go back to my homeland and live a quiet life there with a young wife, forget about all these horrors and all the complexities… No, I wouldn’t forget, I’d organize defenses so the Fathers’ bureaucrats wouldn’t stick their noses in there, and if the Guards showed up there, I’d fight to the last on the threshold of my own home… Only I’m not a Highlander. I have no business up in the mountains—my business is down here, I don’t intend to put up with all of this… And Rada? Well, if Rada really does love me, then she’ll understand, she’ll have to understand… I don’t want to think about that now, I don’t want to love, this is not the time for me to love…

He started thinking and didn’t immediately realize that something had changed inside the building. Someone was walking along the corridor, someone was whispering on the other side of the wall, and suddenly someone started bustling about in the corridor. Rada desperately cried out “Mak!” and immediately fell silent, as if someone had squeezed her mouth shut. He stood up and dashed to the window, but the door swung open and Rada appeared in the doorway, with her face completely drained of blood. He caught the familiar odor of the Guards’ barracks, and metal-tipped boots started clattering, no longer trying to conceal their presence. Rada was shoved into the room and men in black coveralls came pouring in after her. Pandi aimed an automatic rifle at Maxim with a bestial expression on his face, and Cornet Chachu, as cunning as ever, and as clever as ever, stood beside Rada, with his pistol jammed against her side.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted. “If you move a single muscle, I’ll shoot!”

Maxim froze. There was nothing he could do; he needed at least two seconds, maybe one and a half, but this killer only needed one.

“Hands up!” the cornet croaked. “Corporal, handcuffs! And ankle cuffs! Move it, massaraksh!”

Pandi, whom Maxim had repeatedly thrown over his head in training, approached with great caution, unclipping a heavy chain from his belt. The bestial expression on his face had been replaced by an expression of concern. “Watch yourself, now,” he told Maxim. “If anything happens, Mr. Cornet will… you know… blow her away… this love of yours…”

He clicked the steel bracelets onto Maxim’s wrists, then squatted down and shackled his legs together. Maxim smiled to himself. He knew what he was going to do next. But he had underestimated the cornet. The cornet didn’t let Rada go. They all went down the stairs together, they all got into the truck together, and the cornet didn’t lower his pistol for a second. Then Gai was shoved into the truck with his hands shackled.

Dawn was still a long way off, it was still drizzling, and the blurred lights barely even lit up the wet street. The guardsmen took their seats on the benches in the back of the truck, the huge, wet dogs silently tried to break free of their leashes, and when they were reined back, they yawned and whimpered. And in the entranceway, the janitor was standing, leaning against the doorpost, with his hands clasped on his stomach. He was dozing.

12

The state prosecutor leaned back in his chair, popped a few dried berries into his mouth, chewed for a while, and took a sip of medicinal water. Squeezing his eyes firmly shut and pressing his fingertips against his weary eyes, he listened. For many hundreds of yards all around, everything was good. The building of the Palace of Justice was empty, the night rain was monotonously drumming on the windows, he couldn’t even hear any sirens or squealing brakes, and the elevators weren’t clanging and humming. There was nobody here except for his night secretary in the reception area, where he was languishing as quiet as a mouse behind the tall door, awaiting instructions. The prosecutor slowly unsealed his eyes and glanced through the drifting blotches of color at the chair for visitors, made to a special design. I should take that chair with me. And I should take the desk too—I’ve grown accustomed to it…

But I’ll probably feel sorry to leave here anyway, won’t I? I’ve warmed this seat so thoroughly over the last ten years… And why should I leave? A man is a strange piece of work: if he’s facing a flight of steps, he simply has to scramble right up to the very top. Up at the very top it’s cold, the drafts blowing up there are very detrimental to one’s health, a fall from that height is fatal, the steps are slippery and dangerous, and you know all that perfectly well, but you still clamber up anyway. You clamber up in defiance of any and all advice, clamber up in defiance of your enemies’ opposition, clamber up in defiance of your own instincts, common sense, and apprehensions—you clamber higher, higher, higher… Anyone who doesn’t clamber higher goes tumbling down, it’s true. But anyone who clambers right up to the top tumbles down anyway…

The chirping of the internal phone interrupted his thoughts. He picked up the receiver and, wincing in annoyance, said, “What is it? I’m busy.”

“Your Excellency,” said the secretary, his voice sighing like a gentle breeze, “a person giving his name as Wanderer, calling on the gray line, insists on speaking with you.”

“Wanderer?” The prosecutor livened up. “Put him through.”

There was a click in the earpiece of the receiver and the secretary sighed, “His Excellency is on the line.”

Following another click, a familiar, self-assured voice spoke in Pandeian. “Egghead? Hello. Are you very busy?”

“Not to you.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“When?”

“Right now, if possible.”

“I am at your disposal,” said the prosecutor. “Come.”

“I’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes. Expect me then.”

The prosecutor put down the receiver and sat completely still for a while, plucking at his lower lip. So he’s shown up, the old darling. And once again completely out of the blue. Massaraksh, the amount of money I’ve blown on that man, probably more than on all the rest, taken together, but I still only know the same as all the rest, taken individually. A dangerous character. Unpredictable. He has spoiled my mood…

The prosecutor cast an angry glance at the documents laid out across the desk, casually raked them into a heap, and stuffed them into the drawer. Just how long has he been gone? Yes, two months. The same as usual. He disappears, destination unknown, no information for two months, and then—he just pops up, like a jack-in-the-box… No, something will have to be done about this jack. It’s not possible to work like this…

Well, all right, what does he want from me? What has actually happened during these two months? Dodger got eaten… He’s not likely to be interested in that. He despised Dodger. But then, he despises everybody… There hasn’t been anything concerning his outfit, and he wouldn’t come to see me about trivial nonsense like that—he would go straight to Dad or Father-in-Law… Perhaps he has sniffed out something curious and wants to form an alliance? God grant, I hope that’s it—only if I were him, I wouldn’t enter into an alliance with anyone… Perhaps it’s the trial? But no, what does the trial have to do with anything…

Ah, what point is there in guessing? We’d better just take the requisite measures. He pulled out a secret drawer and switched on all the phonographs and hidden cameras. We’ll preserve this scene for posterity.

Well, where are you, Wanderer? In his agitation he broke into a sweat and started violently trembling. To calm himself down, he tossed a few more berries into his mouth, chewed for a moment, closed his eyes, and started counting. When he had counted to seven hundred, the door opened and, waving aside the secretary, he walked into the office—that lanky spindle-legs, that bleak humorist, that hope of the Fathers, hated and adored, dangling by a thread from second to second and never falling; scraggy and stoop-shouldered, with round, green eyes and large, protruding ears, wearing his perpetual, ludicrous anorak reaching down to his knees; as bald as a baby’s bottom, a sorcerer, power broker, and devourer of billions…

The prosecutor stood up to greet him. With this man there was no need to pretend and speak in constrained words. “Greetings, Wanderer,” he said. “Have you come to boast?”

“About what?” Wanderer asked, collapsing into the familiar chair and raising his knees incongruously high. “Massaraksh, I forget about this damned contraption every time. When are you going to stop deriding your visitors?”

“A visitor should feel awkward,” the prosecutor declared in an edifying tone of voice. “A visitor should be ludicrous, otherwise what enjoyment will I get from him? Here I am looking at you now, and I feel quite jolly.”

“Yes, I know you’re a jolly fellow,” said Wanderer. “Only your sense of humor is very unsubtle… And, by the way, you may sit.”

The prosecutor realized that he was still standing. As usual, Wanderer had been quick to even the score. The prosecutor sat as comfortably as he could manage and took a sip of his curative swill. “So?” he asked.

“You have in your clutches,” his visitor said, “a man whom I very much want. A certain Mak Sim. You put him away him for reeducation, remember?”

“No,” the prosecutor sincerely replied, feeling a certain degree of disappointment. “When did I put him away? In connection with what case?”

“Only just recently. In connection with the blown-up tower case.”

“Ah, I remember… Well, what of it?”

“That’s all,” said Wanderer. “I need him.”

“Hang on,” the prosecutor said in annoyance. “I didn’t conduct the trial. I can’t possibly remember every convicted offender.”

“I thought the people in the department were all yours.”

“There was only one of mine—all the rest were genuine… What did you say he was called?”

“Mak Sim.”

“Mak Sim,” the prosecutor repeated. “Ah, that Highlander spy… I remember. There was some strange kind of business with him—he was shot, but unsuccessfully.”

“Yes, it appears so.”

“Some kind of exceptional strongman. Yes, something was reported to me. But what do you need him for?”

“He’s a mutant,” said Wanderer. “He has very curious mentograms, and I need him for my work.”

“Are you going to have him dissected?”

“Possibly. My people spotted him a long time ago, when he was still being exploited in the Special Studio, but then he gave us the slip.”

Feeling monumentally disappointed, the prosecutor stuffed his mouth with berries. “OK,” he said, feebly chewing. “So how are things going with you?”

“As always, wonderful,” Wanderer replied. “And with you too, I’ve heard. You finally undermined Twitcher after all. Congratulations… So when will I receive my Mak?”

“Well, I’ll send the dispatch tomorrow. He’ll be delivered in five or seven days.”

“Surely not for free?” Wanderer said.

“As a favor,” said the prosecutor. “But what can you offer me?”

“The very first protective tin hat.”

The prosecutor chuckled. “And the World Light into the bargain,” he said. “But anyway, bear in mind that I don’t want the first tin hat. I want the only one… And incidentally, is it true that your gang has been commissioned to develop a directional radiation unit?”

“It might be.”

“But listen, what the hell do we need it for? Don’t we have enough troubles already? Couldn’t you just clamp down on this work?”

Wanderer bared his teeth. “Are you afraid, Egghead?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” said the prosecutor. “And aren’t you afraid? Or did you, perhaps, imagine that the love between you and Brother-in-Law is forever? He’ll zap you with your own radiation unit… As sure as I’m sitting here.”

Wanderer bared his teeth again. “You’ve convinced me,” he said. “That’s agreed, then. “I’m going to see Dad now. Is there anything you’d like me to pass on?”

“Dad’s angry with me,” said the prosecutor. “And I find that damned unpleasant.”

“All right,” said Wanderer. “That’s what I’ll tell him.”

“Joking aside,” said the prosecutor, “if you could just put in a little word…”

“Well, you are our Egghead,” Wanderer said in Dad’s voice. “I’ll give it a try.”

“Is he, at least, happy with the trial?”

“How should I know? I’ve only just arrived.”

“Well then, find out… And concerning your… what did you say his name was? Let me make a note of it…”

“Mak Sim.”

“Right… I’ll write concerning him tomorrow.”

“Keep well,” Wanderer said, and walked out.

The prosecutor sullenly watched him go. Yes, I can only envy him. What a position he holds. The only one that our defense depends on. It’s too late now for regrets, but perhaps I ought to have cozied up to him. But how could I cozy up to him? There’s nothing he needs; he’s the most important one anyway, we’re all dependent on him, we all swear by him… Ah, if I could simply grab a man like that by the throat—wouldn’t that be just wonderful! If only there was at least something he needed! But it’s always just Here you are, then with him… He wants an educatee, some kind of rare jewel… He has interesting mentograms, don’t you know… But actually this educatee is a Highlander, and just recently Dad has been talking a lot about the mountains… Perhaps it’s worthwhile paying some attention to this… No matter how the war turns out, Dad is still Dad… Massaraksh, it’s impossible to do any more work today anyway…

He spoke into the microphone. “Koch, what do you have on the convict Sim?” He suddenly remembered something. “I think you put together some kind of dossier about him…”

“Yes indeed, Your Excellency,” the secretary sighed like a breeze. “I had the honor to draw Your Excellency’s attention to—”

“Let me have it. And bring me some water.”

He put down the receiver and the night secretary instantly appeared in the doorway, as intangible as a shadow. A thick document folder appeared on the desk; there was a quiet tinkling, a glugging of water, and a full glass appeared beside the folder. The prosecutor took a sip as he scrutinized its cover.

“An abstract of the case of Mak Sim (Maxim Kammerer). Prepared by Administrative Aide Koch.” Holy cow, this is one thick abstract… He opened the folder and took out the first sheaf of paper.

“The testimony of Cornet To’ot”… “The testimony of the accused Gaal”… sketch maps of some border region in the South… “He was not wearing any other clothing. His speech seemed articulate to me but was absolutely incomprehensible. An attempt to speak to him in Hontian produced no response…” Oh, these border cornets! A Hontian spy on the southern border… “The drawings made by the prisoner appeared quite surprisingly skillful to me…” Well, there are plenty of surprising things in the South. Unfortunately. And the circumstances of this Sim’s appearance don’t stand out too distinctly against the general background of various other southern circumstances. Although, of course… But let’s take a look.

The prosecutor set that sheet of paper aside, selected two of the larger berries, popped them into his mouth, and picked up the next sheet. “The conclusions of an expert commission, consisting of staff members of the Institute of Fabrics and Clothing… We, the undersigned…” hmm… right… right… “have investigated with all the laboratory methods available to us the item of clothing sent to us from the Department of Justice…” more gibberish of some kind…

A strange pair of pants. So am I supposed to understand that these are his pants… The prosecutor took a finely sharpened pencil and wrote in the margin: “Secretary. Why do you not provide explanatory notes? Whose pants are they? Where did the pants come from?” Right…

And the conclusions? Formulas… Yet more formulas… Massaraksh, more formulas… Aha! “…a technology that is not known in our country or in any other civilized states (according to prewar data).”

The prosecutor set the conclusion aside. Well, pants… So OK. Pants are pants… What comes next? “Certificate of medical examination.” Interesting. What, that’s his blood pressure? Oho, those are some lungs! And what on earth is this? Signs of four fatal wounds… Now this is sheer mysticism. Aha… “See the testimony of the witness Chachu and the accused Gaal.” Seven bullets—well, well. Hmm… And there are certain divergences: Chachu testifies that he fired his gun for purposes of self-defense when in danger of being killed, but this Gaal claims that Chachu fired because Sim wanted to take his pistol from him. Well, that’s no concern of mine… Two bullets into the liver—that’s too many for any normal man… Riiight, he can bend a coin into a tube… He can run with a man on his shoulders… Aha, I read that before. I remember now—at that point I thought that this was an extremely large and healthy young man, and they are usually stupid. And I didn’t read any more…

But what’s this? Aah, an old friend:

The prosecutor leaned back in his chair. No, this really is too much. Perhaps he is actually immortal for good measure. Yes, Wanderer ought to find all of this interesting. Let us see what comes next.

Here’s a serious document. “Conclusion of a Special Commission of the Department of Public Health. Subject: Mak Sim. No reaction to white radiation. No counterindications to his serving in the special forces.” Aha… That was when he was enlisting in the Guards. White radiation, massaraksh… the bloody butchers, the sons of bitches… And this is their evaluation for purposes of the investigation…

On being tested with white radiation at various different intensities, up to and including the maximum level, he failed to display any reaction. His reaction to A-radiation was zero level in both senses. His reaction to B-radiation was zero level. NOTE: We consider it our duty to state that the subject (Mak Sim, approximately 20 years of age) represents a danger in view of possible genetic consequences. Complete sterilization or elimination is recommended…

Oho! These guys don’t mess around. Who is it they have there now? Ah, it’s Amateur. Yes, no joker, no joker, that’s for sure. I recall that Colt the Joker used to tell an excellent joke about that… massaraksh, I can’t remember it… But anyway, there’s nobody here. Now we’ll eat a little berry, wash it down with a bit of water… filthy swill, but they say it helps… OK, what comes next?

Oho, so he’s already been there too! Let’s see now… Zero-level reaction again, probably…

When subjected to augmented methods of interrogation, the suspect Sim did not provide any testimony. In accordance with paragraph 12 concerning the noninfliction of visible physical harm on suspects who are due to appear at a public court hearing, only the following methods were applied:

A. Acu-surgery, including at the deepest level, with penetration of nerve ganglia (a paradoxical reaction, with the stimulated subject falling asleep).

B. Chemical processing of the nerve ganglia with alkaloids and alkalis (a similar reaction).

C. Light chamber (no reaction; the stimulated subject was surprised).

D. Steam thermal chamber (weight loss without any unpleasant sensations). After this last investigation the use of augmented methods had to be discontinued.

Brrrrr… What a horrific document.

Yes, Wanderer is right—this man is some kind of mutant. Normal people can’t do things like that… Yes, I have heard that mutations can have positive outcomes, if only rarely… That explains everything… apart from the pants, that is. As far as I know, pants don’t mutate…

He picked up the next sheet of paper. It wasn’t interesting: the testimony of the director of the Special Studio at the Directorate of Television and Radio Broadcasting. An idiotic institution. They record the ravings of various psychos for the amusement of their distinguished audience. As I recall, this studio was thought up by Kalu the Swindler, who was a bit of a wackadoodle himself… Well, well, so the studio has survived! Swindler’s long gone, but his batty studio is flourishing… From the director’s testimony, it appears that Sim was an exemplary subject, and it would be most desirable to have him back again…

Stop, stop, stop! Transferred to the authority of the Department of Special Research in accordance with warrant number such and such on such and such a date… And there it is, the warrant, and it’s signed by Fank… The prosecutor sensed a faint dawning of enlightenment. Fank… You’ve been up to something here, Wanderer.

No, let us not be hasty with our conclusions. He counted to thirty to calm himself down and picked up the next sheet of paper—or, in fact, a rather thick sheaf of sheets: “Abstract from a report of the Special Ethnolinguistic Commission concerning verification of the presumed Highland origins of M. Sim.”

He began absentmindedly reading, still thinking about Fank and Wanderer, but then, to his own surprise, he became interested. This was a curious investigation that linked together and discussed all the denunciations, evidence, and witness testimony that had any bearing on the matter of Mak Sim’s origins: anthropological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and their analysis, the conclusions from studying the suspect’s phonograms and mentograms and his own drawings. The whole thing read like a novel, although the conclusions were extremely meager and cautious. The commission did not assign M. Sim to any of the known ethnic groups living on the continent. (The report cited the special opinion of the well-known paleoanthropologist Shapshu, stating that he discerned a great degree of similarity between the skull of the suspect and the fossil skull of so-called Ancient Man, who had lived on the Archipelago more than a hundred thousand years ago, but the two were not identical.) The commission confirmed the complete psychological normality of the suspect at the present moment, but conceded that in the recent past he could have suffered from one form or another of amnesia, conjointly with the comprehensive displacement of his true memory by a false one.

The commission had conducted an analysis of the phonograms preserved in the archive of the Special Studio and had reached the conclusion that the language in which the suspect spoke at that time could not be assigned to any of the groups of known languages living or dead. For this reason the commission conceded the possibility that this language could be a product of the suspect’s imagination (a so-called fish language), especially since at the present time he himself claimed that he no longer remembered that language. “The commission abstains from any definite conclusions, but is inclined to assume that in the person of M. Sim we are dealing with a mutant of some previously unknown type…”

Good ideas occur to great minds at the same moment, the prosecutor enviously thought, and quickly leafed through the “Special Opinion of Commission Member Professor Porrumovarrui.” The professor, himself a Highlander, recalled the existence deep in the mountains of the semilegendary land of Zartak, inhabited by the Birdcatcher tribe, which to this day had still not been subjected to ethnographical study, and to which the civilized Highlanders attributed magical knowledge and the ability to fly through the air without any mechanical devices. “According to existing accounts, Birdcatchers are extremely large and tall, possess immense physical strength and stamina, and also have golden-brown skin. All of this coincides quite remarkably with the physical characteristics of the suspect…”

The prosecutor toyed with his pencil above Professor Porru-… etc., then put the pencil down and said in a loud voice, “This opinion would probably account for the pants too. Those incombustible pants…”

He ate a berry and glanced over the next sheet of paper. “An abstract from the stenographic record of the trial.” Hmm… So what’s this?

What kind of nonsense is this? Why am I being fobbed off with this? What comes next? Massaraksh, the trial again.

Hmmm, amusing… But what’s this at the end?

The prosecutor smiled and put the piece of paper down. I get it. Indeed, a strange combination: math and physics for his pleasure, but he doesn’t know elementary things. Just like an eccentric professor in some trashy novel.

The prosecutor glanced through a few more pages. I don’t understand, Mak, why you cling to this little female… What was her name?… Rada Gaal. You don’t have an intimate relationship with her, you don’t owe her anything, the idiotic state counsel doesn’t have the slightest grounds for tying her in with the underground… But the impression is given that, by keeping her in their sights, they can make you do absolutely anything. A very useful quality—for us, but a very inconvenient one for you…

Riiight—basically all this evidence comes down to the fact that you, my brother, are a slave to your word and an inflexible individual in general. You didn’t make the grade as a political activist. And you’re not really interested anyway…

Hmmm, photographs… So that’s what you’re like. A likable face—very, very likable… Rather strange eyes… Where was it they photographed you? At the trial?… Just look at you: cheerful, clear-eyed, in such a relaxed pose. Where did they teach you to sit so elegantly and in general to carry yourself like that? The bench for the accused is something like my visitors’ chair—impossible to sit on in a relaxed pose. A curious individual, most curious… But then, that’s all trivia. That’s not the point.

The prosecutor crept out from behind his desk and started striding around his office. Something was sweetly tickling his brain, something was inciting him, egging him on… I found something in this folder… something important, something extremely important… Fank? Yes, that’s important, because Wanderer only uses his Fank for the very important cases, the most important ones. But Fank is only the confirmation. What’s the most important thing? The pants… humbug… Ah! Yes, yes, yes. It isn’t in the folder.

He picked up the phone. “Koch, what was that about an attack on a convoy?”

“Fourteen days ago,” the secretary immediately sighed gently, as if he were reading a text prepared in advance, “at eighteen hundred hours and thirty-three minutes, an armed assault was carried out on police vehicles transferring the suspects in cases 6981–84 from the courthouse to the municipal jail. The assault was beaten off, and during the exchange of fire one of the attackers was seriously wounded and died without regaining consciousness. The body was not identified. The investigation into the attack was discontinued.”

“Who did it?”

“That was not determined.”

“Meaning…”

“The official underground had nothing to do with it.”

“Your observations?”

“It is possible that the attack was carried out by members of the left wing of the underground, attempting to free the accused Dek Pottu, a.k.a. General. Dek Pottu is a high-level, experienced HQ staff officer, known to have close ties with the left wing—”

The prosecutor dropped the receiver. Well then, it could all really be so. And it could all not be so. Right, let’s skim through it again. Southern border, idiotic cornet… Pants… Runs with a man on his shoulders… Radioactive fish, 77 units… Reaction to A-radiation… Chemo-processing of nerve ganglia… Stop! Reaction to A-radiation. “His reaction to A-radiation was zero level in both senses.” The prosecutor pressed his open palm against his pounding heart. Zero in both senses!

He grabbed the receiver again. “Koch! Immediately prepare a special courier with an armed escort. And a private railcar to the south… No! My electromotive… Massaraksh!” He hastily thrust his hand into the desk drawer and turned off all the recording devices. “Get on with it!”

Still pressing his left hand to his heart, he took a personal dispatch form out of a writing case and started rapidly but legibly inscribing:

He grabbed another form:

Then he finished his glass of water, poured himself some more, and started writing on a third form, but this time slowly, pondering every word: “Dear Wanderer! Things have turned out rather stupidly. It has only just come to light that the subject in which you are interested has disappeared without a trace, as quite often happens in the southern jungles…”