“You lousy spongers,” Heiger said in disgust. “All the money I’ve put into you, and what do I get…”
“Ah, come on now,” said Andrei. “I’ve been trying to get this expedition out of you for two years. If you want to know what sort of world you live in, put up the money, the transport, the men. Otherwise, nothing will be done. All we need is an arc of about five hundred kilometers. We’ll measure the gravity, variations in brightness, variations in height—”
“All right,” Heiger interrupted. “We won’t talk about that now. Those are details. You just get it clear that one of the expedition’s goals is to reach the beginning of the world. Have you got that clear?”
“We have,” said Andrei. “But we don’t understand why you need that.”
“I want to know what’s there,” said Heiger. “There is something there. And it might be important for many reasons.”
“For instance?” Andrei asked.
“For instance, the Anticity.”
Andrei snorted. “The Anticity… You mean to say you still believe in it?”
Heiger got up, clasped his hands behind his back, and started striding around the dining room. “Believe in it, don’t believe in it,” he said. “I have to know for certain whether it exists or not.”
“It became clear to me a long time ago,” Andrei said, “that the Anticity is merely an invention of the former leadership.”
“Like the Red Building,” Izya said in a low voice, giggling.
Andrei frowned. “The Red Building has nothing to do with this. Heiger himself stated that the former leadership was preparing a military dictatorship, it needed an external threat—and there you have the Anticity.”
Heiger stopped in front of them. “But why exactly are you protesting against an expedition all the way to the very end? Surely you must be at least a little bit curious about what might be there? What kind of counselors has God given me?”
“But there isn’t anything there!” said Andrei, feeling disoriented. “There’s fierce cold, eternal night, a desert of ice… The far side of the moon, do you understand?”
“I am in possession of different information,” said Heiger. “The Anticity exists. There isn’t any desert of ice, or if there is, it can be crossed. There’s a city, exactly like ours, but what goes on there, we don’t know, and what they want there—we don’t know that either. But they say, for instance, that everything there is the other way round. When things are good for us here, things are bad for them there…” He broke off and started walking around the dining room again.
“Oh God,” said Andrei. “What is this mumbo jumbo?”
He glanced at Izya and bit his tongue. Izya was sitting there with his arms thrown back behind his chair. His necktie had slipped around under his ear; he was looking triumphantly at Andrei, with a greasy, beaming smile on his face.
“I see,” said Andrei. “Might I be informed from which sources you drew this information?” he asked Izya.
“The same ones as ever, my dear man,” said Izya. “History is a great science. And in our City it has an especially large number of tricks up its sleeve. After all, in addition to all the other things, what is really great about our City? The archives in it don’t get destroyed, do they? There are no wars, no invasions, what is written with the pen is not hacked apart with the ax…”
“Those archives of yours…” Andrei said in annoyance.
“Yes indeed! Fritz will tell you I’m not lying—who found coal? Three hundred thousand tons of coal in an underground storage facility. Did your geologists find it? No, Katzman found it. Without even leaving his little study, mind you.”
“In brief,” said Heiger, sitting down on his chair again, “setting aside the science and the archives, I want to know the following. One. What lies in our rear? It is possible to live there? What useful materials can we extract there? Two. Who lives there? Along the entire distance: from this place”—he tapped his fingernail on the table—“all the way to end of the world, or the beginning, or as far as you get… What kind of people are they? Are they people? Why are they there? How did they get there? And three. Everything you can manage to find out about the Anticity. This is the political goal that I have set myself. And this is the genuine goal of the expedition, Andrei, you have to understand that. You’ll take this expedition, explore everything that I’ve mentioned, and report the results to me here, in this room.”
“What did you say?” Andrei asked.
“You’ll report. Here. In person.”
“You want to send me there?”
“Naturally. What did you think?”
“I’m sorry,” said Andrei, flustered. “What on Earth for? I wasn’t planning on going anywhere… I’m up to my eyes with work here in the City—who can I dump that on? And I don’t want to go anywhere!”
“What do you mean by that—you don’t want to go? Why have you been pestering me? If not you, then who can I send?”
“My God,” said Andrei. “Anyone at all! Appoint Quejada to lead it… a highly experienced prospector… or Butz, for example…”
He fell silent under Heiger’s intent stare. “Let’s not talk about Quejada or Butz,” Heiger said in a quiet voice.
Andrei couldn’t think of anything to say to that, and an awkward silence fell.
Then Heiger poured himself some cold coffee. “In this City,” he said in the same quiet voice, “there are only two or three men I trust. Out of them, you’re the only one who can lead the expedition. Because I’m certain that if I ask you to go all the way to the end, you’ll go all the way to the end. You won’t turn off halfway down the road and you won’t allow anyone else to turn off halfway down the road. And when you present your report to me afterward, I’ll be able to believe that report. I could trust Izya’s report, for instance, too, but Izya’s goddamned worthless as an administrator and a totally useless politician. Do you understand me? Either you lead this expedition or the expedition won’t happen.”
Silence fell again. Izya said awkwardly, “Oh-ho-ho-ho… Maybe I should step outside, administrators?”
“Stay in your seat,” Heiger ordered, without even turning toward him. “There, eat the cakes.”
Andrei feverishly tried to make sense of things. Abandon everything. Selma. The house. My calm, smooth-running life. Why the hell has this been landed on me? Amalia. Trudging all that way to God knows where. Heat. Filth. Lousy food… Have I gotten old, then? A couple of years ago I’d have been thrilled with an offer like this. But now I don’t want it. I just don’t want it at all… Izya every day—in Homeric doses. Soldiers. And we’ll probably travel on foot, won’t we, for the whole thousand kilometers, carrying sacks over our shoulders, and not empty sacks either, dammit… And guns. Mother of God, we might have to shoot out there! What the hell do I want with that—facing up to bullets? What the hell does a goat want with an accordion? Why the hell would a wolf want a waistcoat—to fray it on the bushes? I’ll definitely have to take Uncle Yura—I don’t trust those soldiers an inch… Heat, and blisters, and stench… And then right at the very edge—hellish damned cold, probably… At least the sun will be behind us all the time… And I have to take Quejada, I won’t go without Quejada, and that’s that—never mind that you don’t trust him, with Quejada at least I can feel confident about the science part… And all that time without a woman, enough to drive you crazy, I’m not used to that anymore. But you’ll pay me for this. You’ll let the chancellery have something, for a start, give me some full-time positions for the Social Psychology department… and a few for Geodesy wouldn’t do any harm… And second, you’ll rap Vareikis over the knuckles. And in general, all these ideological restrictions—I won’t have them anywhere near my science. In the other departments, by all means, that’s no concern of mine… There isn’t even any water there! That’s why the City keeps creeping southward, isn’t it—in the north the springs are drying up. So will you order us to carry water with us? For a thousand kilometers? “So am I going to lug the water on my back?” he asked irritably.