“Yes, I suppose so,” said Andrei. “Probably that’s the way it all is. But even so, this idea still isn’t mine!”
Andrei stopped and took a tight grip on Izya’s sleeve. Izya immediately opened his eyes and asked in a frightened voice, “What? What is it?”
“Shut up,” Andrei said through his teeth.
There was something up ahead of them. Something was moving, not spinning around in a column, not trailing about just above the stone, but moving through all of that. Toward them.
“People,” Izya said delightedly. “Listen, Andriukha, people!”
“Quiet, you jerk,” Andrei said in a whisper.
He’d already realized that they were people. Or one person… No, it looked like two. Standing there. They’d probably noticed him and Izya too… Now he couldn’t see a damned thing through the cursed dust again.
“There, you see!” Izya said in a triumphant whisper. “And you kept moaning: we’re going to croak…”
Andrei cautiously took off his harness and backed toward his cart, keeping his eyes fixed on the indecipherable shadows ahead of them. Dammit, how many of them are there, after all? And how far is it to them from here? About a hundred meters, maybe? Or less? He found the automatic in the cart by touch, slid back the bolt, and said to Izya, “Move the carts together, lie down behind them. You can cover me if anything…”
He stuck the automatic in Izya’s hands and slowly set off forward, without looking back, holding his hand on his holster. The visibility was abominable. He’ll shoot me he thought, meaning Izya. Plant a bullet right in the back of my head…
Now he could make out that one of the others was also walking toward him—an indeterminate, lanky silhouette in the swirling dust. Does he have a gun or not? Here’s the Anticity for you. Who could ever have thought it? Oh, I don’t like the way he’s holding his hand! Andrei cautiously unbuttoned his holster and took hold of the ribbed handle. His thumb automatically set itself on the safety catch. It’s OK, everything will work out fine. It has to. The main thing is not to make any abrupt movements.
He pulled the pistol out of the holster. The pistol got caught on something. Suddenly he felt afraid. He tugged harder, then even harder, and then with all his strength. He clearly saw an abrupt movement by the man who was walking toward him (tall, tattered, exhausted, with a dirty beard right up to his eyes)… It’s stupid, he thought, squeezing the trigger. There was a shot, there was the flash of a return shot, he thought there was a shout from Izya… and there was a blow to his chest that instantly extinguished the sun.
“Well now, Andrei,” the Mentor’s voice said with a note of solemnity. “You have passed through the first circle.”
The bulb under the green glass shade was lit, and in the circle of light a fresh copy of Leningrad Pravda was lying on the desk, with a large leading article entitled “The Love of Leningraders for Comrade Stalin Is Boundless.” A radio was buzzing and muttering on a set of shelves behind him. Mom was rattling dishes in the kitchen and talking to the woman who shared the apartment. There was a smell of fried fish. In the enclosed yard outside the window little kids were squealing and kicking up a racket in a game of hide-and-go-seek. The damp autumn air came in through the small transom at the top of the window, which was wide open. Only a minute ago, all this had been completely different from the way it was now—far more ordinary and familiar. It had been without a future. Or rather, separate from the future.
Andrei aimlessly smoothed out the newspaper before he spoke. “The first? Why the first?”
“Because there are many more still to come,” the Mentor’s voice said.
Then Andrei got up, trying not to look in the direction the voice came from, and leaned his shoulder against the cupboard by the window. The black well shaft of the yard, weakly illuminated by the yellow rectangles of the windows, was below him and above him, and somewhere far above, in a sky that had already turned dark, Vega was shining. It was absolutely impossible to leave all this again and absolutely—even more!—impossible to stay here among all this. Now. After everything.
“Izya! Izya!” a woman’s voice called stridently in the yard. “Izya, come home for supper already! Children, have you seen Izya?”
And the children’s voices down below started shouting, “Izka! Katzman! Go on, your mom’s calling you.”
Tense in every muscle, Andrei stuck his face right up against the glass, peering into the darkness. But all he could see were indecipherable shadows darting between the banked-up stacks of wood on the wet, black bottom of the shaft.
AFTERWORD
BY BORIS STRUGATSKY
The idea for The Doomed City first came to us in March 1967, when the work on Tale of the Troika was going full steam ahead. It was at the Artists’ and Writers’ House in Golitsyno—in the evenings there we regularly took a stroll through the village before bed, lazily discussing our work, both current and forthcoming, and during one of these strolls we hit on a subject, which at the time we called The New Apocalypse. It is very difficult, probably even impossible at this stage, to reconstruct the image of the City that we painted for ourselves back then, in those bygone days. I suspect it was something drastically different from the final version of the world of the Experiment. Suffice it to say that another provisional title for the same novel turns up in our letters from the late 1960s: My Brother and I. Seemingly this novel was originally conceived as autobiographical to a significant degree.
We never worked so long and so painstakingly on any of our other works, either before or after. Three years was spent amassing, scrap by scrap, the episodes, the characters’ biographies, individual phrases and turns of speech; we invented the City, its peculiarities, and the laws governing its existence, as well as a cosmography, as authentic as we could possibly make it, for this artificial world, and its history. It was genuinely delightful and fascinating work, but everything in this world ends sometime, and in June 1969 we drew up the first detailed plan and adopted the definitive title—The Doomed City. This is the title of a famous painting by Roerich that had once astounded us with its somber beauty and the sense of hopelessness emanating from it.