He looked at Heiger. Fritz was leaning back in his chair, absentmindedly and yet intently picking his teeth with his finger, and Andrei was suddenly stunned by a simple thought that was terrifying in its simplicity: Fritz was nothing more than a noncommissioned officer of the Wehrmacht, wasn’t he? A semi-educated drillmaster who hadn’t read ten worthwhile books in his entire life, and yet he was the one who decided things. As a matter of fact, I decide things, too, Andrei thought.
“In our situation,” he said to Izya, “any decent man simply had no choice. People were hungry, people were being victimized, they lived with fear and physical torment—children, old people, women… It was our duty to create decent living conditions.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” said Izya. “I understand all that. You were motivated by pity, compassion, etc., etc. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s not hard to feel pity for women and children who are weeping from hunger—anyone can do that. But will you be able to feel pity for a burly hunk of a guy with a sex organ this big”—Izya demonstrated with his hands—“a man pining away from boredom? Denny Lee clearly could, but will you be able to do it? Or will you take the horsewhips to him?”
He paused, because ruddy-cheeked Parker had come into the dining room, accompanied by two pretty girls in white aprons. They cleared the table and served coffee with whipped cream; Izya immediately smeared it across his face and proceeded to lick himself clean, like a cat, all the way out to his ears.
“And anyway, do you know what I think?” he said thoughtfully. “As soon as society has solved some problem that it has, it immediately comes face-to-face with a new problem of the same magnitude… no, of even greater magnitude.” Then he livened up. “And that, by the way, gives rise to an interesting little point. Eventually society will come face-to-face with problems of such complexity that it will be beyond mankind’s power to solve them. And then so-called progress will stop.”
“Nonsense,” said Andrei. “Mankind doesn’t set itself problems that it can’t solve.”
“But I’m not talking about the problems mankind sets itself,” Izya objected. “I’m talking about the problems mankind runs into. They just come up on their own. Mankind never set itself the problem of famine. It simply used to starve.”
“Oh, here we go!” said Heiger. “That’s enough. You’ve got carried away with your fancy verbiage. Anyone would think we had nothing to with our time but gab.”
“What do we have to do with our time?” Izya asked in surprise. “I, for instance, am on my lunch break.”
“As you wish,” said Heiger. “I wanted to talk about your expedition. But of course, we can always defer that.”
Izya froze with a coffee cup in his hand. “Oh, come now,” he said dourly. “Why defer it? Let’s not defer it—we’ve deferred it so many times already.”
“Well then why are you gabbling like that?” asked Heiger. “It makes me feel sick listening to you.”
“What expedition is that?” Andrei asked. “For the archives, or what?”
“The great expedition to the north!” Izya proclaimed, but Heiger stopped him by holding up his large, white, open hand.
“This is a preliminary discussion,” he said. “But I’ve already made the decision to go ahead with the expedition, and funds have been allocated. Transport will be ready in three or four months. But at this point we need to define the general goals and program of action.”
“You mean it will be an expedition with multiple goals?” asked Andrei.
“Yes. Izya will get his archives, and you’ll get your observations of the sun and whatever else it is you want…”
“Thank God!” Andrei said, “At last!”
“But we shall have at least one other goal,” said Heiger. “Long-range reconnaissance. The expedition must travel very far to the north. As far as possible. As far as the fuel and water last. And therefore the members of the team must be specially selected, with great discrimination. Only volunteers, and only the very best of the volunteers. No one really knows what might be up there, in the north. It’s quite possible that apart from searching for papers and gazing through your tubes, you’ll have to shoot, sit out a siege, break out, and so on. So there will be soldiers in the group. We’ll specify who and how many of them later.”
“Oh, as few as possible!” Andrei said, wincing. “I know your soldiers; working with them would be intolerable.” He pushed his cup away in annoyance. “And anyway, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why we need soldiers. I don’t understand what kind of gun battles there can be out there. It’s a desert out there, ruins—how could there be any gun battles?”
“There could be anything at all out there, my brother,” Izya said merrily.
“What does ‘anything’ mean? So maybe the place is swarming with devils—do you want us to take priests along with us?”
“Maybe I could be allowed to finish what I was saying?” Heiger asked.
“Say what you have to say,” Andrei replied, annoyed. That’s always the way, he thought. Like the story about the monkey’s paw. If a wish does come true, it always comes with the kind of add-on that means you’d be better off if it hadn’t. No, dammit. I won’t let the officers and gentlemen have this expedition. The leader of the expedition is Quejada—the head of the scientific section and the entire team. Otherwise you can go to hell, you won’t get any cosmography, and your sergeant majors can order Izya around all on his own. It’s a scientific expedition, so it has to be led by a scientist… At this point he recalled that Quejada was politically unreliable, and recalling it made him so furious that he missed part of what Heiger was saying.
“What was that?” he asked with a start.
“I asked you how far away from the City could the end of the world be?”
“More precisely—the beginning,” Izya put in.
Andrei shrugged angrily. “Do you read my reports at all?” he asked Heiger.
“I do,” said Heiger. “You say there that as one moves farther to the north, the sun will decline toward the horizon. Obviously, somewhere far to the north it will set behind the horizon and completely disappear from sight. So I’m asking you how far it is to that place—can you tell me?”
“You don’t read my reports,” said Andrei. “If you did read them, you’d have realized that my whole idea for this expedition is precisely in order to discover where that ‘beginning of the world’ is.”
“I realized that,” Heiger said patiently. “I’m asking you for an approximation. Can you tell me that distance, at least approximately? How far is it—a thousand kilometers? A hundred thousand? A million? We’re determining the goal of the expedition, do you understand that? If that goal is a million kilometers away, then it’s no longer a goal. But if—”
“OK, that’s clear,” said Andrei. “Why didn’t you say so? Well then… The difficulty here is that we don’t know the curvature of the world or the distance to the sun. If we had numerous observations along the entire line of the City—not the present City, you realize, but from the beginning to the end—then we could determine these magnitudes. We need a large arc, you understand? At least several hundred kilometers. All the material we have so far only covers an arc of fifty kilometers. And that means the accuracy is negligible.”
“Give me the absolute minimum and absolute maximum,” said Heiger.
“The maximum is infinity,” said Andrei. “That’s if the world is flat. And the minimum is in the order of a thousand kilometers.”