While Zef was reporting, the detainee ran his agile eyes around the room, smiling at everyone there in a strange, sinister manner—his teeth were even and as white as sugar. The cornet clasped his hands behind his back, moved closer, and looked the man over from head to foot. “Who are you?” he asked.
The detainee smiled in an even more sinister manner, slapped his open hand on his chest and uttered something unintelligible; it sounded like “mah-sim.” The officer of the guard guffawed, the sentries started giggling, and the cornet smiled too. Gai didn’t immediately get the joke but then he remembered that in thieves’ slang “mah-sim” meant “knife-eater.”
“Apparently he is one of your company,” the cornet remarked to Zef.
Zef shook his head, scattering a cloud of dust out of his beard. “Absolutely not,” he said. “‘Mah-sim’ is what he calls himself, but he doesn’t understand thieves’ argot at all. So he isn’t one of ours.”
“A degenerate, probably,” the officer of the guard suggested, and the cornet gave him an icy look. “Naked,” the officer of the guard ardently explained, backing away toward the door. “Permission to carry on, Mr. Cornet?” he barked.
“Go,” said the cornet. “And send someone to get the headquarters medical officer, Mr. Zogu. Where did you catch him?” he asked Zef.
Zef reported that the previous night he and his unit had been combing quadrant 23/07. They had destroyed four self-propelled devices and one automated device, purpose unknown, losing two men in the explosion, and everything was in order. At about seven in the morning, this unknown individual had approached Zef’s campfire from out of the forest. They had spotted him from a distance and followed him, concealing themselves in the bushes, and then chosen a convenient moment to detain him. At first Zef had taken him for a fugitive, then decided that he wasn’t a fugitive but a degenerate, and was on the point of shooting him, but had changed his mind because this man… At this point Zef jutted out his beard, at a loss for words, and concluded, “Because it became clear to me that he wasn’t a degenerate.”
“From what did that become clear to you?” the cornet asked. The detainee just stood there motionless, his arms folded across his powerful chest, glancing at the cornet and Zef by turns.
Zef said it would be hard for him to explain. In the first place, this man hadn’t been afraid of anything, and he still wasn’t. And in addition, he had taken the soup off the fire and eaten precisely a third of it, exactly as a comrade was supposed to do, and before that he had shouted into the forest, evidently calling to Zef’s men, sensing that they were somewhere nearby. And furthermore, he had tried to feed them mushrooms. The mushrooms were poisonous, and they didn’t eat them or let him eat them, but he had obviously felt an urge to give them some kind of a treat, clearly as a sign of gratitude. And furthermore, everyone knew that no degenerate possesses physical abilities that exceed those of an average, frail person. But on the way here, this man had worn Zef out as if Zef were a little kid, strolling through patches of underbrush and fallen trees as if they were flat ground, jumping across ditches, and then waiting for Zef on the other side. And also, for some reason—maybe out of sheer bravado?—he had sometimes taken Zef in his arms and run two or three hundred strides with him like that.
The cornet adopted a pose of intense concentration while listening to Zef, but the moment Zef stopped speaking, he abruptly turned to the detainee and barked point-blank at him in Hontian, “Your name? Rank? Assignment?”
Gai was delighted by the adroitness of the move, but the detainee clearly didn’t understand Hontian either. He bared his magnificent teeth again, slapped himself on the chest, and said “Mah-sim,” then jabbed his finger into the educatee’s side and said “Zef,” and after that he started talking—slowly, with long pauses, pointing up at the ceiling or down at the floor, or running his hands through the air around himself. Gai thought that he picked up several familiar words in this speech, but those words had nothing at all to do with the matter at hand, or with each other. “Bedstead,” the detainee said, and then “Hurly-burly, hurly-burly… Squirm…”
When he fell silent, Corporal Varibobu piped up. “I think he’s a cunning spy,” the old inkpot declared. “We should report him to the brigadier.”
However, the cornet took no notice of him. “You may go, Zef,” he said. “You have demonstrated zeal, and that will be credited to your account.”
“Most obliged to you, Mr. Cornet,” Zef barked, and he had already turned to go when suddenly the detainee gave a quiet whoop, leaned over the barrier, and grabbed the bundle of blank forms lying on the desk in front of the corporal. The old fogy was frightened to death (how about that for a guardsman!), and he recoiled, flinging his pen at the savage. The savage deftly caught the pen in midair, propped himself against the barrier where he was standing, and started sketching something on a form, taking no notice of Gai or Zef, who had grabbed hold of his sides.
“As you were!” the cornet ordered, and Gai willingly obeyed; holding this brown bear was just like trying to stop a tank by grabbing hold of its caterpillar tread. The cornet and Zef stood on each side of the detainee and looked at what he was scribbling.
“I think it’s a diagram of the World,” Zef said uncertainly.
“Hmm…” the cornet responded.
“But of course! There in the center is the World Light, and this here is the World… And as he understands things, we are here.”
“But why is it all flat?” the cornet skeptically asked.
Zef shrugged. “Perhaps it’s a child’s perception. Infantilism… Look here, see? This is how he shows the way he got here.”
“Yes, possibly. I’ve heard about that kind of insanity.”
Gai finally managed to squeeze between the firm, smooth shoulder of the detainee and Zef’s prickly ginger thickets. He thought the drawing he saw was funny. It was how schoolchildren in the first grade represented the World: a little circle at the center, signifying the World Light, a large circle around it, signifying the Sphere of the World, and on its circumference, a thick black dot. You only had to add little arms and legs to it and you had “This is the World, and this is me.” The unfortunate freak hadn’t even shown the circumference of the World correctly, he’d drawn some sort of oval. Well, he clearly was deranged… And he’d also drawn a dotted line leading from under the ground to that dot, as if to say, Look, that’s how I got here!
Meanwhile the detainee took another form and rapidly sketched two little Spheres of the World in opposite corners, joined them together with a dotted line, and then drew in some kind of squiggles. Zef whistled hopelessly and asked the cornet, “Permission to retire?”
But the cornet didn’t let him go. “Uhhh… Zef,” he said. “As I recall, you used to be active in the area of… uh…” He tapped a bent finger against his temple.
“Yes, sir,” Zef replied after a pause.
The cornet started striding around the office. “Could you not perhaps… uhhh… how can I put it… formulate your opinion concerning the individual in question? Professionally, if I might express myself in that way.”
“I couldn’t really say,” said Zef. “Under the terms of my sentence, I have no right to act in a professional capacity.”
“I understand,” said the cornet. “That’s quite correct. I commend you. Buuut…”