They looked like tanks, only at the spot where the artillery turret should have been, each of them had a tall latticework cone with a dull, rounded object at its summit. They were traveling fast, gently swaying over uneven sections of ground, and they weren’t black like the tanks of the unfortunate military convicts, or grayish-green like the army’s assault tanks—they were yellow, the bright, jolly yellow of the Guards patrol vehicles… The right flank of the line was already out of sight behind the hills, and Maxim only had time to count eight radiation emitters. He seemed to sense the insolence in them, these masters of the situation. They were going into battle but didn’t consider it necessary to conceal or camouflage themselves; they deliberately made an exhibition of themselves with their bright coloring, and their ugly five-yard-high humps, and the absence of any normal weapons.
The men driving these vehicles and controlling these machines must consider themselves perfectly safe. But then, they probably weren’t even thinking about that, they were simply hurrying forward, their radiation whips lashing on the iron herd that was stampeding through hell at that moment, and they almost certainly knew nothing about those whips, just as they didn’t know that those whips were lashing them too…
Maxim saw that the radiation emitter on the left flank of the line was heading into the hollow, and he set off down the slope of the hill to meet it. He walked at his full height. He knew that he would have to extract the black cattle-herders out of their iron shell by force, and he wanted that. Never in his life had he wanted anything so badly as he now wanted to feel living flesh under his fingers…
When he reached the bottom of the hollow, the radiation emitter was already very close. The yellow machine came hurtling straight at him, blindly staring with the glass lenses of its periscopes, its latticework cone ponderously swaying, unsynchronized with the bobbing of the vehicle, and now he could see the silvery sphere, bristling with close-set, glittering needles, that was swaying on its summit.
They never even thought of stopping, and Maxim stepped out of the way, letting them pass, ran along beside them for a few yards, and jumped up onto the armor plating.
PART V
THE EARTHMAN
18
The state prosecutor was a light sleeper and the purring of the telephone immediately woke him. He picked up the receiver without opening his eyes. The rustling voice of his night secretary notified him, as if apologizing, “Seven thirty, Your Excellency…”
“Yes,” said the prosecutor, still not opening his eyes. “Yes. Thank you.”
He switched on the light, threw back the blanket, and sat up. For a while he sat there, staring at his own pale, skinny legs and thinking with sad amazement that here he was, already in his sixth decade, but he couldn’t remember a single day when he had been allowed to get a good sleep. Somebody had always woken him up. When he was a cornet, he had been woken after a drinking bout by his doltish brute of an orderly. When he was the chairman of an extraordinary tribunal, he had been woken by his fool of a secretary with documents that hadn’t been signed yet. When he was a grammar school boy, his mother used to wake him so that he would go to his lessons, and that was the most heinous time—those were the most repulsive awakenings. And they had always told him You have to.
You have to, Your Excellency… You have to, Mr. Chairman… You have to, my little son… And now he was the one who told himself “You have to…” He got up, pulled on his robe, splashed a handful of eau de cologne on his face, put in his teeth, glanced into the mirror, massaging his cheeks with a hostile grimace, and walked through into his office.
The warm milk was already sitting on the desk, and the saucer of salty biscuits was lying under a starched napkin. They had to be drunk and eaten, as medication, but first he went over to the safe, pulled the door open, took out a green folder, and put it on the desk beside his breakfast. Crunching on a biscuit and sipping the milk, he thoroughly examined the folder until he was certain that nobody had opened it since yesterday evening. How much has changed, he thought. Only three months have gone by, but how everything has changed!
He mechanically glanced at the yellow telephone, and for a few seconds he couldn’t take his eyes off it. The telephone remained silent, as bright and elegant as a jolly toy… as appalling as a ticking time bomb that is impossible to defuse… The prosecutor convulsively gripped the green folder between his finger and thumb and squeezed his eyes shut. He felt the fear growing and hastily checked himself: no, this was no good, right now he had to remain absolutely calm and reason absolutely impassively… I have no choice in any case. So it’s a risk…
Well, then take the risk. There has always been a risk and always will be, it just has to be reduced to the minimum. And I shall reduce it to the minimum. Yes, massaraksh, to the minimum!… You appear not to be convinced of that, Egghead? Ah, you have doubts? You always have doubts, Egghead, that’s a certain quality that you have—and good for you…
Well then, let us try to dispel your doubts. Have you heard of a man by the name of Maxim Kammerer? Have you really heard about him? You just think that you have. You have never heard about this man before. You are going to hear about him right now for the first time. And I ask you please to hear me out and reach the most objective, most unprejudiced judgment possible concerning him. It is very important to me to know your objective opinion, Egghead—you know, at this point in time the very integrity of my skin depends on it. The pale skin with blue veins that is so very dear to me…
He finished chewing the final biscuit and drained the milk in a single gulp. Then he said out loud, “Let us begin.”
He opened the folder. This man’s past is hazy. And that, of course, is a poor start when getting to know someone new. But you and I know not only how to deduce the present from the past but also how to deduce the past from the present. And if our Mak’s past really is so necessary to us, when all is said and done we can always do that, deduce it from the present. This is called extrapolation…
Our Mak begins his present by escaping from penal servitude. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. At the very moment when Wanderer and I are reaching out our hands for him. Here is the panic-stricken report from the commandant-general, a classic howl from an idiot who has messed things up and has no hope of escaping punishment: he is not to blame for anything, he did everything according to his instructions, he did not know that the individual concerned had voluntarily joined the suicide sappers, but the individual concerned did join them and got himself blown up in a minefield. He didn’t know… And Wanderer and I didn’t know that, either. But we ought to have known! The individual concerned is an unpredictable kind of person—you ought to have anticipated something of the kind, Mr. Egghead… Yes, at the time I was staggered by the news, but now we understand what happened: someone explained about the towers to our Mak, he decided that there was no point hanging around in the Land of the Fathers, and he took off to the South, feigning his own death…
The prosecutor lowered his head into his hands and feebly rubbed his forehead. Yes, that was when the whole business started… That was the first screwup in my series of screwups: I believed that he had been killed. But how could I not have believed it? What normal man would go running off to the South, to the mutants, to certain death? Anybody would have believed it. But Wanderer didn’t.