“Yes!” said Andrei. “Of course! You know what I’ve decided? I’m going to stop trying to find anyone, or trying to figure anything out, I’m just going to grab some kind of stick and go. I’ll join a brigade. And if they won’t take me, I’ll go on my own. There are women left out there, after all… and children.”
The Mentor nodded briefly at every word Andrei said. He wasn’t smiling any longer; his expression was serious and sympathetic now.
“There’s just one thing,” said Andrei, pulling a wry face. “What to do about Donald?”
“Donald?” the Mentor echoed, raising his eyebrows. “Ah, Donald Cooper?” He laughed. “Of course, you think Donald Cooper must already have been arrested and repented of his sins… Nothing of the sort. At this precise moment Donald Cooper is organizing a brigade of volunteers to repel this brazen invasion, and of course he isn’t any kind of gangster and he hasn’t committed any crimes, and he got the gun on the black market in exchange for an old repeating watch. There’s nothing to be done. He’s spent his entire life with a gun in his pocket—he’s used to it!”
“Well, of course!” said Andrei, feeling tremendously relieved. “It’s obvious! I didn’t really believe it myself, it’s just that I thought… OK!” He swung around to leave, but stopped. “Tell me… if it’s not a secret, of course… Tell me, what’s all this for? Monkeys! Where have they come from? What are they supposed to prove?”
The Mentor sighed and slipped down off the windowsill. “There you go again, Andrei, asking me questions…”
“No! I understand everything, I do!” Andrei said with sincere feeling, pressing his hands to his heart. “I only…”
“Wait. There you go again, asking me questions to which I don’t have answers. You must understand that at last: I don’t have answers! The soil erosion under the buildings, remember that? The changing of water into bile… but then again, that was before your time… And now this—baboons… Remember, you used to keep quizzing me, asking how come—people of different nationalities, all speaking the same language and not even suspecting a thing. Remember how it astounded you, how perplexed you were, how you tried to prove to Kensi that he was speaking Russian, and Kensi tried to prove to you that you were speaking Japanese, remember? But now you’ve gotten used to it—those questions don’t even occur to you any longer. It’s one of the conditions of the Experiment. The Experiment is the Experiment, what else can I tell you?” He smiled. “Right, off you go, Andrei, off you go. Your place is out there. Action first and foremost. Each in his place, and each doing everything he can!”
And Andrei walked out—in fact, he didn’t walk, he darted—into the corridor, which had completely emptied now, and skittered down the front steps into the square, where he immediately spotted a serious-looking crowd around a truck under a lamppost and merged into it without the slightest hesitation: someone thrust a heavy metal picket into his hand, and he felt armed, strong, and ready for decisive battle.
A short distance away someone—a very familiar voice!—was issuing stentorian commands to line up in a column three across, and Andrei, holding his picket on his shoulder, ran that way and found himself a place between a burly Latino wearing suspenders over a nightshirt and a skinny, flaxen-haired intellectual type in a rumpled suit, who was in a terribly nervous state—he kept taking off his eyeglasses, breathing on the lenses, wiping them with a handkerchief, sticking them back on his nose, and adjusting them with his thumb and forefinger.
It was a small brigade, only about thirty men. And the one giving the commands turned out to be Fritz Heiger, which was rather galling in a way, but on the other hand Andrei had to admit that in this situation Fritz Heiger, although he might be a random leftover from the Nazi defeat, had shown up in exactly the right place.
As befitted a former noncommissioned officer of the Wehrmacht, his manner of expressing himself was forthright, and listening to him was quite repugnant. “Cov-errr ooff!” he yelled loud enough for the whole square to hear, as if he were commanding a regiment on tactical exercises. “Hey, you there, in the flip-flops! Yes, you! Pull your belly in! And you, the one with your legs spread like a cow after she’s been mounted! That applies to you too. Trail pikes! Not shoulder pikes, I said trail—you, the woman in suspenders! Ten-shun! Following me, forward… As you were! For-ward maarch!” They shuffled off raggedly.
Someone immediately stepped on Andrei’s heel from behind; he stumbled, shoved the intellectual type with his shoulder, and the intellectual type, of course, dropped the glasses that he was wiping yet again. “Clumsy clod!” Andrei said to him, losing his temper.
“Be careful!” the intellectual type whined in a shrill voice.
“For God’s sake!” Andrei helped him find his glasses, and when Fritz pounced on them, choking on his fury, Andrei told him to go to hell.
Andrei and the intellectual type, who kept thanking him nonstop as he stumbled along, caught up with the column and covered another twenty meters or so before they were all ordered to “board the trucks.” However, there was only one vehicle, a special truck for transporting wet cement. When they got on board they could feel it squelching and slopping about under their feet. The man in flip-flops clambered ponderously back out over the side and announced in a high voice that he wasn’t going anywhere on that truck. Fritz ordered him to get back onto the truck. The man protested in an even higher voice that he was wearing flip-flops and his feet were soaked. Fritz made mention of a pregnant swine. The man in the soaked flip-flops, not frightened in the least, protested that he certainly wasn’t a swine, that a swine might possibly agree to ride in that filth—he offered his profound apologies to all who had agreed to ride in this pigsty, but… At this point the Latino clambered down off the back of the truck, spat disdainfully at Fritz’s feet, stuck his thumbs under his suspenders, and strolled away at a leisurely pace.
Observing all this, Andrei experienced a certain malicious delight. Not that he approved of the actions of the man in flip-flops, let alone those of the Mexican—they had undeniably acted in an uncomradely manner and in general behaved like philistines—but it was extremely interesting to wait and see what our bruised and battered Unterleutnant would do now and how he would extricate himself from the situation that had arisen.
Andrei was obliged to admit that the bruised and battered Unterleutnant extricated himself with honor intact. Without saying a word, Fritz swung around on his heels, hopped up onto the running board beside the driver and commanded, “Let’s go!” The truck set off, and at that very moment someone switched on the sun.
Struggling to stay on his feet, constantly clutching at the men next to him, Andrei watched with his neck twisted around as the crimson disk slowly kindled to a blaze at its usual spot. First the disk trembled, seeming to pulsate, growing brighter and brighter, turning orange, then yellow, then white, and then it went out for an instant and immediately flared up again at full power, so bright that it was impossible to look at.
The new day had begun. The impenetrably black, starless sky turned a hazy light blue—sultry, with a breath of wind as hot as if it were blowing out of a desert. On all sides the City seemed to appear out of nothing—bright, colorful, streaked with bluish shadows, huge and vast… Multiple stories heaped up on top of each other, buildings banked up above buildings, and not a single building was like any other, and the incandescent Yellow Wall could be seen, rising up and disappearing into the sky on the right, and on the left, in the openings above the roofs, an azure void appeared, as if the sea were over that way, and you instantly started feeling thirsty. Out of habit many of the men immediately looked at their watches. It was exactly eight o’clock.