In the meantime our valiant troops would advance deep into enemy territory, and the most interesting part would begin, but unfortunately we wouldn’t see that. Our glorious ironclad torrent would lose its cohesion and start spreading across the country, inevitably moving out of range of the mobile radiation emitters’ influence. If Maxim hadn’t lied about Gai, the men who broke out in this way would immediately start suffering from radiation hangover, which would be all the stronger because the Guards would have spared no energy in whipping them on during the breakthrough… “Massaraksh!” Zef howled. “I can just see those cretins crawling out of their tanks, lying down on the ground, and begging to be shot. And the good-hearted Hontians, not to mention the Hontian soldiers, driven berserk by this hideous outrage, won’t refuse them, of course… There could be unprecedented slaughter!”
The train was picking up speed and the car was energetically rocking from side to side. In the farthest corner, criminal convicts were shooting dice, the lamp was swaying up under the ceiling, and on the lower bunks someone was monotonously muttering—he must have been praying. The air reeked of sweat, dirt, and the bucket latrine. The tobacco smoke stung Maxim’s eyes.
“I think they’re taking that into account at General HQ,” Zef went on, “and so there won’t be any whirlwind breakthroughs. It will be a half-hearted positional war; the Hontians, for all their stupidity, will eventually realize what’s going on, and they’ll start hunting down the radiation emitters… Basically, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he concluded. “I don’t even know if they’ll give us any chow in the morning. I’m afraid they won’t feed us again—why would they bother?”
They said nothing for a while. And then Maxim asked, “Are you certain that we’ve done the right thing? That our place is here?”
“Orders from HQ,” Zef muttered.
“There might be an order,” Maxim objected, “but we’ve got heads on our shoulders too. Maybe it would have been better to decamp with Boar. Maybe we would have been more use in the capital.”
“Maybe,” said Zef, “and maybe not. You heard that Boar is counting on atomic bombing—many of the towers would be destroyed, and free regions would emerge. But what if there isn’t any bombing? Nobody knows anything, Mak. I can picture very clearly to myself the state of bedlam at our HQ… The rightists are strutting and swaggering; heads will roll in the government any day now, and those bastards will scramble for the free places…” He pondered, rummaging in his beard. “Boar spun us a line about the bombing. But I don’t think that was why he headed for the capital. I know him, he’s been creeping up on those leaderist types for a long time… so it’s quite possible that heads will roll at our HQ too…”
“So it’s bedlam at our HQ as well,” Maxim slowly said. “So they’re not ready either…”
“How could they be ready?” Zef protested. “Some of them dream of destroying the towers, but others dream of keeping them… The underground isn’t a political party, it’s like a mixed salad, with shrimp…”
“Yes, I know…” said Maxim. “A mixed salad.”
The underground wasn’t a political party. In fact, the underground wasn’t even a front of political parties. Specific circumstances had split its HQ into two irreconcilable groups: categorical opponents of the towers and categorical supporters of the towers. All these people were more or less opposed to the existing order of things, but, massaraksh, their motivations diverged so widely!
There were “sociobiologists,” who absolutely couldn’t care less who was in power, whether it was Dad, who was a major dynastic financier, the head of an entire clan of bankers and industrialists, or a democratic union of representatives of the working strata of society. All they wanted was for the cursed towers to be razed to the ground and for everyone to be able to live like human beings, as they put it—that is, to live in the old, prewar manner.
There were aristocrats, the surviving remnants of the privileged classes of the old empire, who still believed that what was happening was merely a protracted, lingering misunderstanding, that the people still remained loyal to the legitimate heir to the imperial throne (a dismal, hulking brute of a man, who drank heavily and suffered from nosebleeds), and that it was only these absurd towers, the criminal brainchild of professors from His Imperial Highness’s Academy of Sciences who had betrayed their oath of allegiance, that prevented our kind, simple-hearted people from manifesting their genuine, genial, simple-hearted devotion to their legitimate lords and masters.
The unconditional destruction of the towers was also supported by the revolutionaries—the local communists and socialists, such as Wild Boar, who had become well versed in theory and well seasoned in practice during the prewar class struggles. For them the destruction of the towers was merely an essential condition for a return to the natural course of history, a signal for the beginning of a series of revolutions that would eventually lead to a just social order. Siding with them were the rebelliously inclined intellectuals such as Zef or the late Gel Ketshef—simply honest people, who regarded the towers as a repulsive and dangerous venture, steering humankind into a dead end.
The leaderists, the liberals, and the enlighteners were in favor of keeping the towers. The leaderists—the extreme right wing of the underground—were, in Zef’s estimation, simply a band of power-seekers who were desperate to obtain departmental appointments, and their efforts were sometimes successful. A certain Kalu the Swindler, who had managed to scramble his way into the Department of Propaganda, had once been a prominent leader of this fascist group. These political bandits were prepared to employ any means at all in their frenzied opposition to any government, if it was composed without their participation.
The liberals were in general opposed to both the towers and the Unknown Fathers. However, what they feared most of all was civil war. They were national patriots, extremely protective of the glory and might of the state, and apprehensive that the destruction of the towers might lead to chaos, a general desecration of sacred values, and the irretrievable disintegration of the nation. They were in the underground because they were all, to a man, supporters of parliamentary forms of government…
And as for the enlighteners, they were undoubtedly honest, sincere people, and far from stupid. They hated the tyranny of the Fathers and were categorically opposed to the use of the towers to deceive the masses, but they considered the towers to be a powerful means for educating the people. They regarded the modern individual as being both a savage and a beast by his very nature. Educating such individuals using the classic methods would require centuries and centuries. Burning out the beast in the human being, strangling the individual’s animal instincts, teaching him to feel kindness and love for his neighbor, teaching him to hate ignorance, falsehood, and philistinism—that was a noble goal, and with the assistance of the towers, this goal could be achieved within a single generation.
There were too few communists, because they had almost all been killed during the war and the coup; nobody took the aristocrats seriously; the liberals were too passive and frequently didn’t know themselves what they wanted. And so the largest and most influential groups in the underground were the sociobiologists, the leaderists, and the enlighteners. They had almost nothing in common, and the underground had neither a unified program, nor a unified leadership, nor a unified strategy, nor unified tactics…
“Yes, a mixed salad…” Maxim repeated. “It’s sad. I had hoped that the underground was intending to somehow exploit the war… the potentially revolutionary situation…”