“Mak!” said Gai. “Have you seen this?”
“Yes,” said Maxim.
“These are heads!” said Gai, “Genuine heads…”
“Look at the photo albums on the table,” said Maxim.
Gai tore his eyes away from the appalling collection with an effort, turned around, and haltingly walked over to the table. The radio was shouting something in an unfamiliar language; music rang out, chimes jangled, and then somebody started speaking again—in a velvety, insinuating voice…
Gai picked up one of the albums at random and opened the hard, leather-bound cover. A portrait. A strange, long face with bushy sideburns that drooped from the cheeks right down to the shoulders, with hair shaved above the forehead, a hooked nose, and unusually shaped eyes. An unfamiliar uniform, with badges or medals of some kind arranged in two rows… What a weird character… Probably some kind of big shot. Gai turned the page. The same individual in a group of other individuals on the bridge of a white submarine, as dour as ever, although the others were grinning, displaying their teeth. In the background, out of focus—something like an esplanade, some unfamiliar-looking structures, vague silhouettes of either palm trees or cacti…
The next page took Gai’s breath away: a burning Dragon with its turret twisted over to the side, the body of a Guards tank crewman hanging out of the hatch, another two bodies lying one on top of the other to one side, and the same character standing over them with his legs straddled—holding a pistol in his lowered hand and wearing a cap that looked like a pointed hood. The smoke from the Dragon was thick and black, but the area was familiar—it was this very shore, this sandy beach with the dunes behind it…
Gai completely tensed up as he turned over the page, and his expectations were met. A crowd of mutants, about twenty people, all naked, a whole heap of freaks, tied together with a single rope. Several brisk-looking pirates in pointed hoods, holding smoking torches, and that character again at one side, obviously giving an order, with his right hand extended and his left resting on the handle of a cutlass. How repulsive those freaks were, it was horrifying just to look at them… But what came next was even more horrifying.
The same heap of mutants, but already burned. The same character standing a short distance away, with his back to the corpses, sniffing a flower and chatting with another character…
A huge tree in the forest, hung all over with bodies. Some suspended by the hands, some by the feet—and these weren’t freaks; one was wearing the check coverall of an educatee, another was in the black jacket of a guardsman.
A burning street, a woman with a baby lying in the road…
An old man tied to a post. His face was contorted, he was shouting, his eyes were squeezed shut. And the same character was right there, checking a medical syringe with a preoccupied air.
And then more hanged, burning, burned mutants, convicts, guardsmen, fishermen, peasants, men, women, old people, little children… an entire beach full of little children and the same character squatting down behind a heavy machine gun… women being dragged along… the same character again with a syringe, the lower half of his face covered by a white mask… a heap of severed heads, and the same character rummaging in this heap with a cane—in this image he was smiling… a panoramic shot: the line of the beach with four tanks on the dunes, all burning, and in the foreground two small figures in black with their hands raised…
Enough. Gai slammed the album shut and tossed it away, sat there for a few seconds, and then flung all the albums onto the floor with a curse.
“And you want to reach an agreement with them?” he yelled at Maxim’s back. “You want to bring them here, to us? That butcher?” He jumped up, rushed over to the albums, and lashed out at them with his foot.
Maxim turned off the radio. “Don’t get into a rage,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with them anymore. And don’t yell at me, you people are the ones to blame, you just let your world be destroyed, massaraksh, you devastated everything, plundered everything, sank to the level of vile, depraved animals. Now what can I do with you?” Suddenly he was there, close beside Gai, and he grabbed him by the sides of his chest. “Now what am I supposed to do with all of you?” he barked. “What? What? You mean you don’t know? Come on, tell me!”
Gai shifted his neck about without speaking, feebly trying to push Maxim off.
Maxim let him go. “I know myself,” he said morosely, “that I can’t bring anyone here. We’re surrounded by ravening beasts… We should be sending out armies against them…” He grabbed one of the albums off the floor and started jerkily turning the pages. “What a world you’ve fouled up,” he said. “What a world! Here, look, what a world!”
Gai looked over his arm. In this album there were no horrors, only landscapes from various places, astoundingly beautiful and clear color photographs: blue bays framed in luxuriant greenery, blindingly white cities above the sea, a waterfall in a mountain gorge, a magnificent highway with a stream of different-colored automobiles on it. And ancient fortresses, and snowy mountain peaks above the clouds, and someone merrily hurtling down a snowy mountain slope on skis, and laughing girls playing in the sea surf.
“Where is all of this now?” Maxim asked. “What have you done with all of this, you damned children of those damned Fathers? Smashed it, befouled it, betrayed and exchanged it for iron… Ah, you… little people…”
He flung the album onto the table. “Let’s go.” He furiously fell against the door, it flew open with a screech and a squeal, and he strode off along the corridor.
On the deck he asked, “Are you hungry?”
“Uh-huh,” Gai replied.
“OK,” said Maxim. “We’ll eat right away. Let’s swim for it.”
Gai clambered out onto the shore first, immediately took off his boot, got undressed, and laid out his clothes to dry. Maxim was still swimming around, and Gai felt alarmed as he watched him. His friend Mak was diving very deep and staying underwater for a really long time. He shouldn’t do that, it was dangerous—how could he have enough air? Eventually Maxim came out, dragging a huge, powerful fish by the gills. The fish looked dazed, as if it just couldn’t understand how it had been caught with bare hands.
Maxim tossed it away from himself into the sand and said, “I think that will do. It’s hardly radioactive at all. Probably a mutant as well. Take your tablets, and I’ll prepare it. We can eat it raw, I’ll teach you how it’s done—it’s called sashimi. Never tried it? Come on, give me a knife…”
When they had eaten their fill of sashimi—Gai had to admit it had turned out pretty tasty—they stretched out naked on the hot sand, and after a long pause Maxim asked, “If we got picked up by the patrols and surrendered, where would they send us?”
“Where? They’d send you to your place of reeducation and me to my place of service… Why?”
“Is that certain?”
“It couldn’t be more certain… The instructions of the commandant-general himself. But why do you ask?”
“Now we’ll go and look for the Guards,” said Maxim.