Fritz shook his blond head. “I don’t know. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in what they want. I’m interested in what I want. And I want to instill some order into this shambles. And, anyway, one of you, I don’t remember who, said that perhaps the entire purpose of the Experiment is to select those who are the most energetic, the most active, the staunchest… It’s not so people can prattle and babble, or dissolve into sloppy puddles like wet pastry, or start wallowing in philosophy, but to show that they can stick to their guns. Those are the ones they’ll select—the ones like me, or like you, say, Andrei, and drop them back on Earth. Because if we haven’t faltered here, we won’t falter there either.”
“It could well be!” Andrei said with a profound air. “I accept that as perfectly possible too.”
“But Donald thinks,” Wang said in a quiet voice, “that the experiment has already failed a long, long time ago.”
Everyone looked at him. Wang was sitting in the same pose of tranquility as before—with his head pulled down into his shoulders and his face raised toward the ceiling; his eyes were still closed.
“He said the Mentors got all snarled up in this stunt of theirs ages ago, they’ve tried everything they can, and now even they don’t know what to do. They’re totally busted, he said. And now everything’s just rolling along under its own inertia.”
Totally bemused, Andrei reached up to scratch the back of his head. So that was Donald’s problem! The reason he’d been so tetchy and out of sorts… Nobody else said anything either. Uncle Yura slowly rolled yet another crooked cigarette, Izya pinched and tormented his wart with a stony-faced smile, Kensi started guzzling cabbage again, and Fritz stared fixedly at Wang, thrusting out his jaw and then setting it back in place. This was the way demoralization set in, Andrei thought fleetingly. With conversations like this. The lack of understanding produced a lack of belief. And the lack of belief meant death. Very, very dangerous. The Mentor had told him bluntly: the essential thing was to believe in the idea to the very end, unconditionally. To realize that not understanding anything was an absolutely indispensable condition of the Experiment. That was the hardest part, naturally. The majority here had no real ideological toughness, no genuine certainty that the bright future was inevitable. That no matter how tough and difficult things might be today, and tomorrow as well, the day after tomorrow the star-spangled sky will surely unfurl above our heads, and life will be bright and festive…
“I’m not an educated man,” Uncle Yura said suddenly, lovingly gluing together his new roll-up with his tongue. “I’ve only got four years of schooling, in case you’d like to know, and as I’ve already told Izya, to be quite frank, I bailed out to get here… The same way you did,” he said, pointing the roll-up at Fritz. “Only for you the road led out of captivity, and for me it led out of the collective farm, you see. Not counting the war, I spent my entire life in the village, and in my entire life I never saw any light. But here I have seen it! I’ll tell you straight, brothers, it’s beyond me what fancy business they’re up to with this Experiment of theirs, and I’m not all that interested. But here I’m a free man, and as long as they don’t touch my freedom, I won’t bother anyone either. But if anyone here suddenly decides they want to change the current status of the farmers, then I can promise you for certain that we won’t leave a stone standing in this City of yours. We’re not a fucking troop of baboons! We won’t let you put any fucking collars round our throats! So that’s the way of things, brother,” he said, speaking directly to Fritz.
Izya giggled absentmindedly, and an awkward silence fell again. Andrei was rather surprised by Uncle Yura’s tirade, and he decided that life must obviously have been especially hard on Yurii Konstantinovich, and if he said he’d never seen any light, then he must have special grounds of his own for that, and asking him about them would be tactless, especially right now. And so Andrei simply said, “We’re probably raising all these questions too soon. The Experiment hasn’t been going on for that long, there’s a huge amount of work to be done, we have to work and believe in the correctness—”
“What makes you think the Experiment hasn’t been going on for very long?” Izya interrupted him with a mocking grin. “The Experiment’s been going on for a hundred years at least. I mean to say, it’s definitely been going on for a lot longer, only I can personally vouch for a hundred years.”
“And how do you know?”
“How far to the north have you gone?” Izya asked.
Andrei was at a loss. He had no idea that there even was a north here.
“You know, north!” Izya said impatiently. “Let us notionally consider that the direction toward the sun, the direction where the swamps and the farms are, is south, and the opposite direction, moving farther in through the City, is north. You haven’t gone any farther than the garbage dumps, have you? But from there the City goes on and on: there are huge city districts, entire palaces…” He giggled. “Palaces and hovels. There’s no one there now, of course, because there’s no water, but someone used to live there once, and let me tell you, that ‘once’ was a pretty long time ago. The documents I discovered in empty houses there—ay-ay-ay! Have you ever heard of the monarch Velarius the Second? There, you see! Well, as it happens, he used to rule there. Only in the times when he used to rule there”—Izya tapped one fingernail on the tabletop—“there were swamps here, and their serfs labored in those swamps… or their slaves. And that was at least a hundred years ago.”
Uncle Yura shook his head and clicked his tongue. Fritz asked, “And what about farther north?”
“I haven’t gone any farther,” said Izya, “but I know people who have gone very far, 100 or 150 kilometers, and plenty have gone and never come back.”
“OK, so what’s there?”
“The City,” Izya said, and paused. “Mind you, they tell shameless lies about those places too. That’s why I only talk about what I’ve discovered for myself. A hundred years for certain. Got that, have you, my friend Andriusha? A hundred years is long enough to give up on any experiment.”
“Well OK, just hang on, will you…” Andrei muttered, flustered. “But they haven’t given up on it!” he exclaimed, perking up. “If they’re still bringing in new people all the time, they haven’t dropped it, they haven’t despaired. It’s just that the problem that’s been set is extremely complex.” A new idea occurred to him and he perked up even more. “And anyway, how do you know what their time scale is like? Maybe our year is just a second to them?”
“I don’t know anything about any of that,” Izya said with a shrug. “I’m just trying to explain to you what kind of world you live in, that’s all.”
“OK!” Uncle Yura interrupted him decisively. “We’ve wasted enough time on empty talk Hey, kiddo! What’s your name… Otto! Leave the girl alone and bring us… No he’s totally wasted already. He’ll break my carboy. I’ll go get it myself.” He slid down off the stool, picked the empty pitcher up off the table, and walked off into the kitchen.
Selma plumped down across her chair so that her legs were higher than her head again and petulantly nudged Andrei on the shoulder. “How long are you going to carry on with this tedious crap? Don’t be such an incredible drag… The Experiment, the Experiment… Give me a light!”