“Andriukha!” Izya called in that familiar, obnoxious voice. “Maybe we should grab a drink?”
They were standing right on the very top of a massive hillock. On the left, the side where the Cliff was, everything was concealed behind a murky veil of dust hurtling along at furious speed, but on the right the air had cleared for some reason, and they could see the Yellow Wall—not smooth and even, the way it was within the limits of the City, but completely covered in mighty folds and wrinkles, like the root of some monstrous tree. Ahead of them at the bottom of the Wall, a field of white stone began—not loose chips but solid stone, a single, monolithic mass—and this field of stone extended as far as the eye could see, and swaying above it half a kilometer away from the hillock were two tall, scrawny dust devils—one yellow and the other black…
“This is something new,” Andrei said, screwing up his eyes. “Look, solid stone.”
“Eh? Yes, I suppose so… Listen, let’s have a glass of water—it’s been four hours already.”
“Yes,” Andrei agreed. “Only let’s go down first.”
They walked down from the hillock and slipped out of their harnesses, and Andrei lugged a red-hot canister out of his cart. The canister caught on the belt of his automatic, then on the sack with the broken remains of the rusks, but Andrei dragged it out anyway, squeezed it between his knees, and opened it. Izya skipped around beside him, holding two plastic mugs at the ready.
“Get the salt,” said Andrei.
Izya instantly stopped skipping. “Oh, come on…” he whined. “Why? Let’s just down it…”
“You’re not getting any without salt,” Andrei said wearily.
“Then let’s do it like this,” said Izya, struck by an inspired idea. He had already put down the mugs on a rock and was rummaging in his cart. “Let’s say I eat my salt and then wash it down with the water.”
“Oh God,” said Andrei, astounded. “OK then, do it that way.” He half-filled the two mugs with hot water that had a metallic smell, took the pack of salt from Izya, and said, “Give me your tongue.”
He sprinkled a pinch of salt on Izya’s thick, furry tongue and watched Izya wince and choke, reaching out greedily for his mug, then he salted his own water and started drinking it in miserly little sips, without taking any pleasure in it, as if it were medicine.
“Good!” Izya said with a croak. “Only not enough. Eh?”
Andrei nodded. The water he had drunk immediately emerged as sweat, and everything in his mouth remained the same as it had been, without even the slightest feeling of relief. He lifted up the canister, figuring something out. There’d probably be enough for a couple of days, and then… And then something else will turn up, he told himself fiercely. The Experiment is the Experiment. They won’t let you live, but they won’t let you croak either… He cast a glance at the white plateau that stretched out ahead of them, radiating heat, bit on his dry lip, and started setting the canister back in the cart. Izya had squatted down and was binding up the sole of his shoe again.
“You know,” Izya panted, “this really is a strange kind of place. Actually I can’t recall anything like it at all.” He glanced at the sun, shading his eyes with his hand. “At the zenith,” he said. “I swear to God, at the zenith. Something’s going to happen… Oh, dump that damned lump of iron, will you, what are you fumbling with that for?”
Andrei carefully arranged the automatic beside the canister. “Without that lump of iron the two of us would have left our bones behind the Pavilion,” he reminded Izya.
“That was behind the Pavilion!” Izya retorted. “Since then we’ve been walking for more than four weeks and we haven’t even seen a fly.”
“All right,” said Andrei. “You don’t have to carry it… Let’s go.”
The stone plateau turned out to be amazingly smooth. The carts rolled over it as if it were asphalt, with the wheels squeaking. But the heat became even more terrible. The white stone flung the sun’s rays back up, and now there was no escape for their eyes. Their feet burned as if they weren’t wearing any shoes at all, and strangely enough, there was as much dust as ever. If we don’t snuff it here, Andrei thought, then we’ll live forever. He walked with his eyes screwed almost closed, and then closed them completely. That made it a bit easier. This is the way I’m going to walk, he thought. And I’ll open my eyes, let’s say, every twenty steps. Or thirty… Take a quick look and move on…
The basement of the Tower had been floored with very similar white stone. Only there it had been cool and dark, and there were lots of thick cardboard boxes standing along the walls, mysteriously full of various hardware items. There were nails, screws, bolts of every possible size, cans of different kinds of glue and paint, bottles of different-colored varnishes, carpentry and machine-work tools, ball bearings wrapped in oilpaper… They hadn’t found anything edible, but in the corner a short, rusty pipe protruded from the wall, with a thin trickle of cold, incredibly delicious water flowing out of it and disappearing under the ground…
“Everything in your system is good,” Andrei had said, setting his mug under the trickle for the twentieth time. “There’s just one thing I don’t like. I don’t like it when people are divided into the important and the unimportant. It’s not right. It’s abhorrent. There’s the temple, and there’s the inane rabble swarming around it. ‘Man is a poor soul, burdened with a corpse.’ Even if that really is true, it’s still not right. The whole damn system should be changed.”
“And am I saying it shouldn’t?” said Izya. “Of course it would be a good thing to change that order of things. Only how? So far all attempts to change the situation and level out the human playing field and set everyone on the same level, in order to make everything right and just—all these attempts have ended in the demolition of the temple so that it wouldn’t tower over everyone, and the severing of any heads that jutted up above the general level. And that’s all. And then the foul-smelling pyramid of the new political elite started growing over the leveled field, expanding as rapidly as a cancerous tumor, even more repulsive than the old one. And so far, you know, no other ways have been invented. Of course, all these excesses haven’t altered the course of history and they haven’t been able to completely destroy the temple, but plenty of brilliant heads have been chopped off.”
“I know,” said Andrei. “But even so. Even so, it’s vile. Any elite is odious.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” Izya exclaimed. “Now, if you said, ‘Any elite that controls the lives and fates of other people is odious,’ then I’d agree with you. But an elite in itself, an elite for itself—who does that interfere with? It irritates people; it makes them furious, it drives them wild!—that’s a different matter, but then, after all, irritating people is one of its functions… And complete equality is a stagnant swamp. We should thank old Mother Nature that such a thing as complete equality is impossible… Don’t get me wrong, Andrei, I’m not proposing a system for rearranging the world. I don’t know any system like that, and I don’t believe it exists. Too many different kinds of systems have been tried, and basically everything has remained the way it was… All I’m offering you is a goal for existence… dammit, I’m not even offering it, you’ve confused me. I’ve discovered this goal in myself and for myself—the goal of my existence, do you understand me? Of my existence and the existence of others like me… After all, I’m only talking to you about it and talking to you at this time because I felt sorry for you—I can see a man who is ready, who has burned everything that he used to worship, and now he doesn’t know what to worship. And you can’t live without worshipping; you imbibed that with your mother’s milk: the need to worship something or someone. They beat it into your head once and for all that if there’s no idea that’s worth dying for, then it’s not even worth living. And people like you, who’ve reached a final understanding, are capable of terrible things. A man can blow his brains out, or turn into a supernatural villain—a convinced villain, a principled, disinterested villain, do you understand? Or else even worse: he’ll start taking revenge on the world because the world is the way it really is, and doesn’t conform to some predetermined ideal or other. And another good thing about the idea of the temple, by the way, is that dying for it is positively counterindicated. You have to live for it. Live every day, with all your strength, at full throttle.”