Maxim gritted his teeth, made a steep turn to the right, and drove his tank as far away as he could from that spot, moving across the slope, sharply heeling over, almost overturning, skirting around the hill, and finally drove into a narrow hollow overgrown with small, young trees. Here he stopped, threw back the front hatch, thrust himself out to the waist, and looked around. This was a suitable spot—the tank was closely surrounded on all sides by high, brownish slopes. Maxim turned off the engine, and immediately Gai started howling some kind of devoted nonsense in a high falsetto voice, something absurdly rhymed, a kind of homespun ode in honor of his greatest and most beloved Mak—the kind of song a dog might compose about its master if it learned to use human language.
“Be quiet,” Maxim ordered. “Drag these men out of here and lay them out beside the tank… Stop, I haven’t finished yet! Do it carefully, these are my beloved friends—our beloved friends.”
“But where are you going?” Gai asked in horror.
“I’ll be here, close by.”
“Don’t go away,” Gai whined. “Or allow me to go with you.”
“You’re disobeying me,” Maxim sternly said. “Do as I told you. And do it carefully—remember that these are our friends.”
Gai started whining, but Maxim wasn’t listening any longer. He clambered out of the tank and ran up the slope of the hill. Somewhere not far away tanks were still moving, their engines strenuously roaring, their caterpillar tracks clanging, their guns occasionally booming. A shell whistled high into the sky. Hunching over, Maxim ran up onto the summit of the hill, squatted down among the bushes, and commended himself once again for making such a shrewd choice.
Down below, a mere stone’s throw away, there was a broad corridor between the hills, and an unbroken torrent of tanks was pouring through that corridor, streaming into it from the smoke-covered plain—low, squat, powerful tanks, with huge, flat turrets and long guns. These weren’t the military convicts, it was the regular army driving by. Deafened and stunned, for several minutes Maxim observed this spectacle, as appalling and improbable as a historical movie. The air oscillated and shuddered from the furious rumbling and roaring, the hill trembled under his feet like a frightened animal, yet somehow it seemed to Maxim that the tanks were moving in somber, menacing silence. He knew perfectly well that inside them, behind the armor plating, crazed soldiers were hoarsely croaking in delirious enthusiasm, but all the hatches were tightly sealed, and each tank seemed to be a solid ingot of inanimate metal…
When the final tanks had passed by, Maxim looked back and down at his own tank, heeled over to one side among the trees, and it seemed to him like a pitiful tin toy, a decrepit parody of a genuine battle machine. Yes, a Force had passed by below… on its way to encounter another, even more terrible Force. Recalling that other Force, Maxim hastily slithered back down into the grove of trees.
He rounded the tank and stopped.
They were lying in a short row: Fank, so white that he was almost blue, looking like a dead man; Zef, huddled up and groaning, clutching his ginger thatch with dirty-white fingers; and merrily smiling Hook, with a doll’s dead eyes. Maxim’s order had been carried out to the letter.
But Gai was also lying there a short distance away, all tattered and covered in blood, with his dead, offended face turned away from the sky and his arms flung out wide; the grass around him was crushed and trampled, and there was a flattened white helmet covered in dark blotches, and someone else’s feet in boots were sticking out of the smashed and broken bushes. “Massaraksh,” Maxim murmured in horror, picturing to himself how only a few minutes ago two snarling, howling dogs had fought to the death here, each striving for the glory of its own master…
And at that moment, that other Force struck its counterblow.
This blow caught Maxim on the eyes. He snarled at the pain, squeezed his eyes shut with all his might, and dropped down onto Gai, already knowing that he was dead but nonetheless trying to shield him with his own body. It was a pure reflex response; he didn’t have time to think about anything or even feel anything except for the pain in his eyes—he was still falling when his brain switched itself off.
When the world around him became tolerable for human perception once again, his awareness switched back on. Probably only a very short time had passed by, only a few seconds, but Maxim came around covered in copious sweat, with a dry throat, and his head was ringing as if he had been struck on the ear with a plank of wood. Everything around him had changed: the world had turned crimson, the world was piled high with leaves and broken branches, the world was filled with incandescent air, and there were bushes, torn up by the roots, burning boughs of trees, and lumps of hot, dry earth raining down from the red sky. And a ghastly, ringing silence.
The living and the dead had been rolled aside. Gai was lying facedown about ten paces away, covered with leaves. Zef was sitting beside him, still holding his head with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. Fank had gone slithering down the slope, getting jammed in a rain gully, and now he was scrambling around in it, scraping his face against the ground. The tank had also been swept lower and overturned. And dead Hook was now leaning back against a caterpillar track, still merrily smiling…
Maxim jumped to his feet, casting aside the branches heaped over him. He ran over to Gai, grabbed hold of him, lifted him up, looked into his glassy eyes, pressed his own cheek against his friend’s, cursed this world and cursed it thrice again, a world in which he was so alone and so helpless, where the dead became dead forever, because there was no way, nothing with which to return them to life… He thought that he wept, hammered his fists on the ground, and trampled the white helmet, and then Zef started screaming in long, drawn-out screeches of pain, and Maxim came to his senses and, without looking around, no longer feeling anything except hate and a yearning to kill, trudged back up the slope to his observation post…
Everything had changed here too. There weren’t any bushes any longer, the baked clay was steaming and cracking, and the slope facing northward was on fire. In the north the crimson sky merged into a sheer wall of blackish-brown smoke, and rising up above that wall, swelling up even as he watched, were strange, bright orange, oily, greasy storm clouds. And a light, damp wind, like a draft drawn into the ash pan of this hellish furnace that had been constructed by misfortunate fools for other misfortunate fools, was blowing toward that spot where thousands of thousands of tons of incandescent ash, and hopes of surviving and living, all cremated and reduced to atoms, were soaring up toward the firmament of heaven, which had snapped under the blow.
Maxim looked down into the corridor between the hills. The corridor was empty; the clay, plowed up by caterpillar tracks and seared by the atomic blast, was smoking, with thousands of little fires dancing on it—smoldering leaves and torn-off branches burning out. And the plain to the south seemed very broad and very deserted; it was no longer obscured by powder fumes, it was red, under a red sky, with solitary, motionless little boxes on it—the wrecked and ruined tanks of the military convicts—and a sparse, jagged line of strange machines was already moving across it, approaching the hills.