He flung off the sheet and deliberately sat in an uncomfortable position, with the edge of the camp bed cutting into his backside, staring at the rectangle of the window, filled with a diffuse light. Then he looked at his watch. It was already after midnight. If I get up now, he thought, and I go down to the ground-floor level… Where is she sacked out down there—in the kitchen? This idea always used to provoke a response of healthy disgust, but this time that didn’t happen. He imagined Skank’s naked, dirty legs, but he didn’t dwell on them, he moved higher… He suddenly felt curious about what she was like naked. After all, a woman’s a woman.
“My God!” he said in a loud voice.
The door immediately creaked and the Mute appeared. A black shadow in the darkness, with only the whites of his eyes gleaming.
“Well, what are you doing here?” Andrei asked dejectedly. “Go and sleep.”
The Mute disappeared. Andrei yawned uneasily and slumped sideways onto the camp bed.
He woke in horror, soaking wet.
“Halt, who goes there?” the sentry howled again under his window. His voice was high-pitched and desperate, as if he were calling for help.
And immediately Andrei heard heavy, crunching blows, as if someone huge were regularly and repeatedly hammering on crumbling stone with a huge sledgehammer.
“I’ll fire!” the sentry squealed in a voice that didn’t even sound human, and started shooting.
Andrei couldn’t remember how he got to the window. In the darkness to his right he saw the fitful orange flashes of shots. The fiery flickering outlined the form of something black, massive, and unmoving farther up the street, with showers of green sparks flying out of it. Andrei didn’t have time to understand anything. The sentry’s ammunition clip ran out, and for a brief moment there was silence, then he squealed again out there in the darkness—exactly like a horse—and his boots started thudding, and suddenly he was there, in the circle of light under the window, waving his empty automatic and still squealing. He dashed to a tractor and cowered in the black shadow behind the caterpillar track, repeatedly tugging on his spare ammunition clip, trying to jerk it out from behind his belt, but he couldn’t… And then those crunching blows of a sledgehammer on stone started up again: boooom, boooom…
When Andrei darted out into the street without his trousers, with his shoelaces dangling free and his pistol in his hand, a lot of men were already there. Sergeant Vogel was roaring like a bulclass="underline" “Tevosyan, Hnoipek! To the right! Prepare to fire! Anastasis! Onto the tractor, behind the cabin! Observe, prepare to fire! Move it! You lily-livered pigs… Vasilenko! To the left! Lie down, and—To the left, you Slavic bonehead! Get down and observe! Palotti! Where are you going, you greasy wop!”
He grabbed the aimlessly running Italian by the collar, gave him a ferocious kick on the backside, and flung him in the direction of the tractor.
“Behind the cabin, you animal! Anastasis, shine the light along the street!”
Men were jostling Andrei in the back and from the sides. He gritted his teeth and tried to stay on his feet, not understanding anything, fighting an overpowering urge to yell out something nonsensical. He pressed himself up against the wall, holding his pistol out in front of him and looking around like an animal at bay. Why are they all running that way? What if there’s an attack from the rear? Or from the roof? Or from the houses across the street?
“Drivers!” Vogel roared. “Drivers, onto the tractors. Who’s that firing there, you bastards? Cease fire!”
Gradually Andrei’s head cleared. Things turned out not to be so bad after all. The men had taken cover where they were ordered to, the scurrying about was over, and at last someone on the tractor turned the searchlight to light up the street.
“There he is!” a strangled voice shouted.
Automatic rifles barked briefly and then fell silent. Andrei only had time to spot something huge, almost higher than the houses, something ugly, with stumps and spikes jutting out in different directions. It cast an endless shadow along the street and immediately turned the corner two blocks away. It disappeared from sight, and the heavy blows of a sledgehammer on crunching stone became quieter, then even quieter, and soon completely faded away.
“What happened there, Sergeant?” the colonel’s calm voice asked above Andrei’s head.
The colonel, with all his buttons fastened, was standing at his window, leaning his hands on the windowsill. “The sentry raised the alarm, Colonel,” Sergeant Vogel replied. “Private Terman.”
“Private Terman, report to me!” said the colonel.
The soldiers started turning their heads, looking around.
“Private Terman!” the sergeant barked. “Report to the colonel!”
In the diffused light of the headlamp, they saw Private Terman frantically scrambling out from behind the caterpillar track. Some piece of the poor devil’s gear got snagged again. He yanked on it with all his might, got to his feet, and shouted in a squeaky voice: “Private Terman reporting on the colonel’s orders!”
“What a scarecrow!” the colonel said fastidiously. “Fasten yourself up, man.”
And at that moment the sun came on. It was so sudden that a chorus of muffled, incoherent exclamations ran through the camp. Many of the men put their hands over their eyes. Andrei squeezed his eyes shut.
“Why did you raise the alarm, Private Terman?”
“An intruder, Colonel,” Terman blurted out with a note of despair in his voice. “He failed to respond when challenged. He was coming directly at me. The ground was shaking! In accordance with regulations, I challenged him twice, then opened fire.”
“Well now,” said the colonel. “I commend you.”
In the bright light everything seemed completely different from five minutes ago. The camp looked like a camp now—weary, worn-out sleds, dirty metal barrels of fuel, tractors covered in dust. Against this ordinary, drearily familiar background, the half-dressed armed men, lying and squatting down with their machine guns and automatic rifles, with mussed hair, creased faces, and disheveled beards, looked absurd and ludicrous. Andrei remembered that he wasn’t wearing any trousers and his shoelaces were dangling loose, and he suddenly felt embarrassed. He cautiously backed away toward the door, but a crowd of drivers, cartographers, and geologists was standing there.
“I beg to report,” Terman was saying in the meantime, having perked up a bit, “that it was not human, Colonel.”
“Then what was it?”
Private Terman was lost for words.
“It was more like an elephant, Colonel,” Vogel said authoritatively. “Or some kind of antediluvian monster.”
“It was like a stegosaurus more than anything,” Tevosyan put in.
The colonel immediately turned his gaze on Tevosyan and examined him curiously for a few seconds. “Sergeant,” he said at last. “Why do your men open their mouths without permission?”
Someone giggled spitefully.
“Silence in the ranks! Permission to punish him, Colonel?”
“I consider—” the colonel began, and at that point he was interrupted.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaa…” someone started whimpering quietly at first, then wailing louder and louder, and Andrei started rapidly glancing around the camp, trying to see who was making that noise and why.
Everyone began shifting about in alarm, turning their heads to and fro, and then Andrei saw Anastasis, whiter than a sheet, almost green, jabbing his hand at something up ahead of him, unable to say a single intelligible word. Gathering his nerve, ready for anything at all, Andrei looked where the man was pointing, but couldn’t see anything there. The street was empty and the heat haze was already shimmering at the far end of it. Then the sergeant suddenly cleared his throat with a hollow sound and tugged his cap down over his forehead, and someone swore in a quiet, desperate voice, but Andrei still didn’t understand, and it was only when an unfamiliar voice wheezed “God save us!” right in his ear that he finally understood. The hairs on the back of his neck started rising and his legs went weak.