Wang started, smiling pitifully, picked up a glass, and pressed it against his lips.
“Tse-tung?” Fritz asked menacingly. “Who’s ’at?”
Andrei drained his glass in a single gulp and, feeling slightly stunned, started hastily jabbing his fork at the hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly it was as if all the conversations were reaching him from the next room. Stalin… Yes, of course. There has to be some kind of link… Why didn’t that ever occur to me before! Phenomena of the same scale—cosmic. There has to be some kind of link and interconnection… Let’s say this is the question: the choice between the success of the Experiment and the health of Comrade Stalin. Which one, for me personally, as a citizen, as a warrior… Of course, Katzman says Stalin’s dead already, but that’s not important. Let’s suppose he’s alive. And let’s suppose the choice I’m facing is: the Experiment or the cause of Stalin… No, rubbish, that’s not right. To continue the cause of Stalin under Stalin’s leadership or continue the cause of Stalin in completely different conditions, exceptional conditions, unforeseen by any theory—that’s how the question is posed.
“And what makes you think the Mentors are continuing the cause of Stalin?” Andrei suddenly heard Izya’s voice say, and realized that he’d been speaking out loud for some time already.
“But what other work can they be doing?” he asked in astonishment. “There’s only one cause on Earth worth working for—building communism! That is Stalin’s cause.”
“That’s a D for you in the Basics of Scientific Communism,” Izya retorted. “Stalin’s cause is the building of socialism in one country, the consistent struggle against imperialism, and the extension of the socialist camp to include the whole world. Somehow I don’t see how you can achieve those goals here.”
“Borrring!” Selma whined. “Let’s have some music! I want to dance!”
But Andrei was already blind and deaf to everything. “You dogmatist!” he barked. “You’re a Talmudist and doctrinarian! And, in general, a metaphysician. You don’t see anything but the form. It doesn’t matter what form the Experiment takes! But it can only have the same content, and only one final result: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the laboring farmers—”
“And the toiling intelligentsia!” Izya put in.
“What damned intelligentsia… What sort of shit-pie garbage is that—the intelligentsia!”
“Yes, true,” said Izya. “That’s from a different era.”
“The intelligentsia is altogether impotent!” Andrei declared bitterly. “A lickspittle social stratum. It serves whoever holds the power.”
“A gang of wimps,” barked Fritz. “Wimps and blabbermouths, an eternal source of slackness and disorganization!”
“Precisely!” Andrei would have preferred to be supported by Uncle Yura, say, but support was useful even from Fritz’s side. “There, if you please: Heiger. Basically the class enemy, but his position coincides perfectly with ours. So it turns out that from the viewpoint of any class, the intelligentsia is shit.” He grated his teeth. “I hate them… I can’t stand those spineless, four-eyed weaklings, blabbermouths, freeloaders. They’ve got no inner strength, no faith, no morality…”
“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun!” Fritz proclaimed in a metallic voice.
“Ah, no,” said Andrei. “I part company with you there. You drop that! Culture is the great heritage of the liberated people. What’s needed here is a dialectical…”
Somewhere close by the phonograph was thundering and Otto was stumbling around drunkenly, dancing with drunken Selma, but Andrei wasn’t interested in that. The best part of all was just beginning, the thing for which he loved these get-togethers more than anything else in the world. The argument.
“Down with culture!” Izya howled, skipping from one empty chair to another in order to move closer to Andrei. “It’s got nothing to do with our Experiment. What is the goal of the Experiment? That’s the question! You just tell me that.”
“I already told you: to create a model of communist society!”
“What in hell’s name would the Mentors want with a model of communist society? Judge for yourself, cabbage-head!”
“And why not? Why not?”
“What I think, though, is this,” said Uncle Yura. “The Mentors aren’t real human beings. They’re, how can I put it… a different species, I suppose… They’ve planted us in a fish tank… or something like a zoological garden… and they’re watching to see what happens.”
“Did you think that up for yourself, Yurii Konstantinovich?” Izya asked, and turned toward him, suddenly immensely interested.
Uncle Yura fingered his right cheekbone and replied evasively, “It emerged in the course of debate.”
Izya actually slammed his fist down on the table. “How incredible!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “Why? Where does it all come from? Why do the most different kinds of people, and people who basically think in entirely conformist terms, come up with this idea that the Mentors are not human in origin? The idea that the Experiment is being conducted by higher powers of some kind?”
“Well, for instance, I asked him straight out,” Kensi put in. “‘Are you aliens?’ He avoided giving a direct answer, but he didn’t actually deny it.”
“And I was told they’re human beings from a different dimension,” said Andrei. It felt awkward talking about the Mentor, like discussing family matters with outsiders. “But I’m not sure I understood correctly… Maybe it was just allegorical.”
“But I won’t have it!” Fritz abruptly declared. “I’m not an insect. I am myself. Aha!” he exclaimed, swinging his hand through the air. “I’d never have ended up here if I hadn’t been taken prisoner, would I?”
“But why?” said Izya. “Why? I feel some kind of internal protest all the time too, and I can’t understand what’s wrong. Maybe in the long run their goals are close to ours—”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” Andrei exclaimed delightedly.
“Not in that sense,” said Izya, gesturing impatiently. “It’s not all as straightforward as you make it out to be. They’re trying to figure out the human race, right? Make sense of it. And problem number one for us is the very same: making sense of the human race, of ourselves. Maybe by figuring things out for themselves, they’ll help us figure things out as well?”
“Ah, no, my friends,” said Kensi, swaying his head from side to side. “Ah, don’t flatter yourselves. They’re preparing to colonize the Earth, and they’re using you and me to study the psychology of their future slaves.”
“But why think that, Kensi?” Andrei said disappointedly. “Why these terrible assumptions? If you ask me, thinking about them that way is simply unfair.”
“Well, I probably don’t really think that,” Kensi replied. “It’s just that I have this strange sort of feeling… All these baboons, the transformation of the water, the general bedlam day after day… One fine day they’ll hand us a confusion of tongues too… It seems like they’re systematically preparing us for some appalling kind of world that we’re going to live in henceforth, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages. It’s like at Okinawa. I was just a little kid then, the war was going on, and the Okinawa boys and girls like me were forbidden to speak their own dialect. Nothing but Japanese. And when they caught some kid, they hung a sign around his neck: I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TALK PROPERLY. And he walked around with that sign.”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Izya, tugging and pinching at the wart on his neck with a frozen smile on his face.
“But I don’t understand!” Andrei declared. “All this is probably perverse supposition, it’s delusory… The Experiment is the Experiment. Of course we don’t understand anything. But then, we’re not supposed to understand! That’s a fundamental condition! If we understood what the baboons are for, what the switching around of professions is for… that understanding would immediately condition our behavior, the Experiment’s integrity would be compromised, and it would fail. That’s perfectly clear! What do you think, Fritz?”