Maxim went back to the campfire, flung a few branches into the flames, and glanced into the pot. The concoction was boiling. He looked around, found something that looked like a spoon, sniffed at it, wiped it on the grass, and sniffed at it again. Then he carefully skimmed the gray scum off the concoction and shook it off the spoon onto the charred wood. He stirred the concoction, scooped up some of it from the edge, blew on it, then puckered up his lips, and tried it. It wasn’t bad at all, something like tahorg liver broth. Then he looked around again and said in a loud voice, “Breakfast is ready!” He couldn’t shake the feeling that his hosts were somewhere close by, but all he could see were motionless bushes, wet from the mist, and the black, gnarled trunks of trees, and all he could hear was the crackling of the campfire and the fussy chattering of the birds.
“Well, OK,” he said out loud. “Suit yourselves, but I’m initiating contact.”
He very quickly started enjoying the taste of it. Maybe the spoon was too big, or maybe his primeval instincts simply got the better of him, but he had lapped up a third of the pot before he even knew it. He regretfully moved a little distance away and sat there for a while, focusing on his gustatory sensations and giving the spoon another thorough wiping, but he couldn’t resist it after all and took another scoop, from the very bottom, of those little, tasty, melt-in-your-mouth brown slices that were like sea cucumber. Then he moved well away, wiped the spoon yet again, and set it across the top of the pot. This was just the right time to appease his feeling of gratitude.
He jumped to his feet, selected several slim sticks, and went into the building. Stepping cautiously across the rotten floorboards and trying not to look over at the human remains in the shade, he started picking mushrooms and threading them on a stick, choosing the very firmest caps. If I could just salt you a bit, he thought, and add a bit of pepper too—but never mind, for first contact this will do anyway. We’ll hang you over the fire, and all your active organic compounds will be dissipated as steam, and you’ll be a delicious treat. You’ll be my first contribution to the culture of this inhabited island, and the second one will be positron emitters. Suddenly it became a bit darker in the building, and he immediately sensed someone watching him. He managed to suppress his urge to abruptly swing around, counted to ten, slowly got up, and, smiling in advance, unhurriedly turned his head.
Looking in at him through the window was a long, dark face with large, despondent eyes and a mouth with its corners despondently turned down. It was looking at him without the slightest interest, with neither malice nor joy, as if it were looking not at a man from a different world but at some tedious domesticated animal that had once again clambered in where it had been told not to go. They looked at each other for several seconds, and Maxim could feel the despondency radiating from that face flood the building, sweep across the forest, across the entire planet and the universe surrounding it, and everything on all sides turned gray, despondent, and dismal. Everything had already happened, it had all happened many times over, and it would happen many more times, and there was no foreseeable salvation from this gray, despondent, dismal tedium. And then it became even darker in the building, and Maxim turned toward the door.
Standing there with his short, sturdy legs planted wide apart, and completely blocking the doorway with his broad shoulders, was a stocky man entirely covered with ginger hair and wearing a dreadful check coverall. Gazing at Maxim out of the riotous ginger thickets of his face were two gimlet-sharp blue eyes, very intent and very hostile, and yet somehow seeming equally jolly—perhaps by contrast with the universal despondency emanating from the window. This hairy roughneck had obviously also seen visitors from other worlds before, but he was used to dealing with these tiresome visitors abruptly, drastically, and decisively—without any contact-making or other such unnecessary complications. Hanging from a leather strap around his neck he had an extremely ominous-looking thick metal pipe, and with his firm, filthy hand he was pointing the outlet of this instrument for lynching alien visitors directly at Maxim’s belly. It was immediately obvious that he had never even heard of the supreme value of human life. Or of the Declaration of Human Rights, or any other such magnificent achievements of progressive humanism, and if you told him about any of these things, he simply wouldn’t believe you.
However, Maxim didn’t have to make that choice. He held the stick with mushroom caps threaded on it out in front of him, smiled even more broadly, and enunciated with exaggerated clarity, “Peace! Friendship!” The despondent individual outside the window responded to this slogan with a long, unintelligible phrase, after which he withdrew from the zone of contact and, to judge from the sounds outside, set about heaping dry branches onto the campfire. The blue-eyed man’s tousled ginger beard started moving, and growling, roaring, clanging sounds came darting out of that dense copper growth, instantly reminding Maxim of the iron dragon at the intersection. “Yes!” said Maxim, energetically nodding. “Earth! The cosmos!” He jabbed his thin stick up toward the zenith, and the ginger-bearded man obediently glanced at the smashed-in ceiling. “Maxim!” continued Maxim, prodding himself in the chest, “Mak-sim! My name is Maxim.” For additional cogency, he struck himself on the chest, like an enraged gorilla: “Maxim!”
“Mahh-ssim!” the ginger-bearded man barked with a strange accent. Keeping his eyes fixed on Maxim, he launched over his shoulder a series of rumbling and clanging sounds, in which the word “Mah-sim” was repeated several times, and to which the invisible, despondent individual responded by uttering a sequence of sinister, dismal phonemes. The ginger-bearded man’s blue eyes started rolling about, his yellow-toothed mouth opened wide, and he howled with laughter. When he was done laughing, the ginger-bearded man wiped his eyes with his free hand, lowered his death-dealing weapon, and unambiguously gestured to Maxim: All right, come on out!
Maxim gladly obeyed. He walked out onto the steps and proffered the stick with the mushrooms on it to the ginger-bearded man once again. The ginger-bearded man took the stick, turned it this way and that way, sniffed at it, and flung it aside.
“Hey, no!” Maxim protested. “Those will have you begging for more…”
He bent down and picked up the stick. The ginger-bearded man didn’t object. He slapped Maxim on the back and pushed him toward the fire. Beside the fire he heaved down on Maxim’s shoulder, making him sit, and started trying to din something into his head. But Maxim didn’t listen. He was watching the despondent individual, who sat facing Maxim, drying some kind of broad, dirty rag in front of the fire. One of his feet was bare, and he kept wiggling the toes. And there were five of those toes—five, not six.
2
Gai was sitting on the edge of the bench by the window, polishing the badge on his beret with his cuff and watching Corporal Varibobu write out his travel order. The corporal’s head was inclined to one side and his eyes were goggling out of it; his left hand was resting on the desk, holding down a form with a red border, and his right hand was unhurriedly tracing out calligraphic letters. It’s great the way he does that, thought Gai, not without a certain envy. The inky-fingered old buzzard, twenty years in the Guards and still a pen pusher. Just look at him glaring, the pride of the brigade—any moment now he’ll stick his tongue out… There, he’s done it. Even his tongue is all inky. Bless you, Varibobu, you cracked old inkwell. We’ll never meet again. And in general it’s a sad business, this leaving—we got a fine set of men together, and real gentlemen officers too, and it’s useful service, meaningful… Gai sniffed and looked out the window.