“Follow me!” the cornet wheezed, and charged in headlong, straight toward the flashes. Maxim and Pandi dashed in after him; the door was too narrow, Pandi was squeezed, and he gave a brief moan. A corridor, fuggy air, powder fumes. Danger on the left. Maxim flung out his hand, grabbed a hot gun barrel, and jerked the weapon upward and away from himself. Someone’s wrenched joints cracked with a quiet but appallingly distinct sound, and a large, soft body froze and limply fell. Up ahead in the smoke, the cornet croaked, “Don’t shoot! Take them alive!”
Maxim dropped his automatic and burst into a large, well-lit room containing a lot of books and pictures, but there was nobody there to shoot at. Two men were writhing around on the floor. One of them kept shouting; he had already gone hoarse, but he kept on shouting. Lying in a faint in an armchair with her head thrown back was a woman, so white that she was almost transparent. The room was full of pain. The cornet stood over the shouting man and looked around, thrusting his pistol into its holster. Pandi shoved Maxim hard in the back as he burst into the room and was followed in by the other guards, dragging the corpulent body of the man who had been shooting. Candidate Zoiza, soaking wet and agitated, handed Maxim the automatic that he had abandoned.
The cornet turned his terrible, dark face toward him. “But where’s the other one?” he croaked, and at that very moment a blue curtain dropped to the floor and a long, thin man in a soiled white doctor’s coat clumsily jumped down off the windowsill. He walked toward the cornet like a blind man, slowly raising two huge pistols to the level of his eyes, which were glazed with pain. “Aiee!” Zoiza screamed.
Maxim was standing sideways and he had no time to turn. He jumped with all the strength in his body, but the man still managed to pull the triggers once. Maxim’s face was scorched and powder fumes filled his mouth, but his fingers had already closed on the wrists in the white coat, and the pistols clattered to the floor. The man went down on his knees and lowered his head, and when Maxim let go of him, he gently tumbled forward onto his face.
“Well, well, well,” the cornet said in an unfathomable tone of voice. “Put that one here too,” he ordered Pandi. “And you,” he said to soaking-wet, pale-faced Zoiza. “Run downstairs and tell the section commanders where I am. Tell them to report on how they’re doing.” Zoiza clicked his heels and dashed toward the door. “Oh yes! Tell Gaal to come up here… Stop yelling, you bastard!” he shouted at the groaning man, and prodded him in the side with the toe of his boot. “Ah, a waste of time. Flimsy garbage, trash… Search him!” he ordered Pandi. “And put them all in a row. Right here, on the floor. And the woman too, she’s sprawled out in the only chair.”
Maxim walked over to the woman, cautiously lifted her up, and moved her onto the bed. He had an uneasy feeling. This wasn’t what he had expected. But now he didn’t even know what he had expected—yellow fangs bared in a snarl of hatred, baleful howling, a ferocious skirmish to the death? He had nothing he could compare his feelings with, but for some reason he recalled how he once shot a tahorg, and the immense beast, so fearsome to look at and reputedly absolutely merciless, tumbled into an immense pit with its spinal column broken, and wept quietly and mournfully, muttering almost articulately to itself in its dying despair…
“Candidate Sim!” the cornet croaked. “I said on the floor!”
He looked at Maxim with his terrifying, transparent eyes, his lips twisted as if in a cramp, and Maxim realized it was not for him, Maxim, to judge or determine what was right here. He was still an outsider; he didn’t know their hates and their loves… He picked up the woman again and put her down beside the corpulent man who had been shooting in the corridor. Pandi and the second guardsman puffed and panted as they painstakingly turned out the arrested group’s pockets. But the prisoners were unconscious. All five of them.
The cornet sat down in the armchair, tossed his peaked cap onto the table, lit up a cigarette, and beckoned Maxim over to him with his finger. Maxim walked across and gallantly clicked his heels.
“Why did you drop your automatic?” the cornet asked in a low voice.
“You ordered us not to shoot.”
“Mr. Cornet.”
“Yes, sir. You ordered us not to shoot, Mr. Cornet.”
Narrowing his eyes, the cornet released a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling. “So if I’d ordered you not to talk, you would have bitten off your own tongue?”
Maxim didn’t say anything. He didn’t like this conversation, but he remembered Gai’s admonitions very clearly.
“What does your father do?” the cornet asked.
“He’s a nuclear physicist, Mr. Cornet.”
“Alive?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Cornet.”
The cornet took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at Maxim. “Where is he?”
Maxim realized that he’d put his foot in it. He had to extricate himself from this situation somehow. “I don’t know, Mr. Cornet. That is, I don’t remember.”
“But you do remember that he’s a nuclear expert… And what else do you remember?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Cornet. I remember a lot of things, but Corporal Gaal thinks they’re all false memories.”
There was the sound of hurrying footsteps in the corridor, and Gai entered the room and snapped to attention in front of the cornet.
“Take care of these half corpses, Corporal,” said the cornet. “Do you have enough handcuffs?”
Gai glanced over his shoulder at the prisoners. “With your permission, Mr. Cornet, I’ll have to get one pair from the second section.”
“Go ahead.”
Gai ran out. There was the sound of boots tramping in the corridor again, and the other section commanders appeared and reported that the operation was proceeding successfully: two suspicious individuals had already been detained, and as usual the residents were rendering active assistance. The cornet ordered them to finish up as soon as possible and to relay the password “Pedestal” to headquarters when they were finished. After the section commanders went out, he lit up another cigarette and said nothing for a while, watching the guardsmen take books down off the shelves, leaf through them, and throw them onto the bed.
“Pandi,” he said in a quiet voice, “you deal with the pictures. Only be careful with that one, don’t damage it—I’ll take it for myself.” Then he turned back to Maxim. “How do you like it?” he asked.
Maxim looked at the picture. It showed the seashore at twilight, a high expanse of water with no horizon, and a woman emerging from the sea. It was fresh and windy. The woman was feeling cold.
“A good picture, Mr. Cornet,” said Maxim.
“Do you recognize the place?”
“Negative. I have never seen that sea.”
“Then what sea have you seen?”
“A quite different one, Mr. Cornet. But that’s a false memory.”
“Rubbish. It’s the same one. Only you were looking at it not from the shore but from a bridge deck, and the deck below you was white, and behind you on the stern there was another bridge, only a bit lower. And it wasn’t this woman on the shore but a tank, and you were directing its aim at the base of a tower… Do you know, you young whelp, what it’s like when a solid shot hits the base of a tower? Massaraksh…” He hissed and crushed out his cigarette end on the table.
“I don’t understand,” Maxim said in a cool voice. “I have never directed any fire at anything.”
“But how can you know that? You don’t remember anything, Candidate Sim!”
“I remember that I have never directed anybody’s fire, Mr. Cornet. And I don’t understand what you are talking about.”