Everyone here is resentful and repressed—either resentful or repressed. Gai is obviously a good-natured, likable kind of person, but sometimes he would suddenly fly into an inexplicable rage and start frenziedly quarreling with the people beside him in the car, and giving me surly looks, and then just as suddenly he would relapse into a profound stupor. And nobody else in the car behaved any better. They sat or lay there perfectly peacefully for hours, talking quietly, even smiling and quietly laughing, and then suddenly someone would start cantankerously griping at the person next to him, and the other person would nervously snap back, and instead of trying to calm them down, the people around them got sucked into the quarrel, and the fracas expanded until it engulfed the entire car, and then everybody was yelling at everybody else, threatening and jostling, and somebody was reaching over somebody else’s head, waving his fists about, and somebody was grabbed by the collar, children were wailing at the tops of their voices, and somebody angrily tweaked their ears, and then everybody gradually quieted down, and they were all surly with each other, reluctant to talk, turning their faces away…
But sometimes the ruckus turned into something absolutely outrageous, with people’s eyes goggling out of their heads, their faces breaking out in red blotches, and their voices raised to bloodcurdling shrieks, while some roared with laughter, some sang, and some prayed, raising their trembling hands above their heads. An insane asylum… And those cheerless, melancholy gray fields drifting by outside the windows, stations blackened with smoke, squalid villages, ruins of some kind that hadn’t been cleared away, and gaunt, ragged women watching the train go by with their hollow, dismal eyes…
Maxim moved back from the window, limply stood in the middle of the cramped little room for a while with a feeling of apathy and mental exhaustion, then forced himself to gather his strength and limber up a bit, using the unwieldy wooden table as his apparatus. It won’t take long before I get completely out of shape like this, he anxiously thought. I can probably cope with another day or two, but then I’ll have to hit the road and roam around in the forest for a while… It would be good to head for the mountains—the mountains they have here look glorious, really wild. It’s a fairly long distance, of course; I couldn’t do it in one night… What was it that Gai called them? “Zartak.” I wonder if that’s their name or just mountains in general. But anyway, the mountains are out of the question. Not on my agenda. I’ve been here for ten days already, and nothing has been done yet…
He squeezed into the shower stall and spent several minutes snorting and rubbing himself down under the heavy artificial rain, which was every bit as repulsive as the genuine kind. It was a little bit colder, but the water was hard and limy, and what was more, it had been chlorinated, and it had also been run through metal pipes.
He wiped himself off with a disinfected towel, and then, feeling dissatisfied with everything—this murky morning, and this suffocating world, and his own idiotic situation, and the fatty breakfast that he would have to eat now—he went back into the room in order to make up the bed, an ugly contraption of iron bars with a greasy, striped pancake of a mattress under the clean sheet.
His breakfast had already been brought in and it was steaming and stinking on the table. Fish was closing the window again.
“Hello,” Maxim said to her in the local language. “Mustn’t. Window.”
“Hello,” she replied, clicking the numerous bolts shut. “Must. Rain. Bad.”
“Fish,” Maxim said in Russian. In fact her name was Nolu, but from the very beginning Maxim had dubbed her Fish—for the general expression of her face and her imperturbability.
She turned around and looked at him with unblinking eyes for a moment. For the umpteenth time, she set her finger to the tip of her nose and said “Woman,” then she prodded Maxim with her finger and said “Man,” and then she jabbed her finger in the direction of the loose coverall that he was so sick of, hanging on the back of a chair. “Clothes. Must!” For some reason she couldn’t bear to see a man in just his shorts. For some reason she needed a man to swaddle himself all the way from his feet right up to his neck.
He started getting dressed and she started making his bed, although Maxim always told her he would do that himself. She moved the table, which Maxim always set against the wall, back into the middle of the room, and resolutely turned the valve of the heating system, which Maxim always set as high as it would go, right back down low again, and Maxim’s monotonous repetitions of “Mustn’t” all shattered against her equally monotonous repetitions of “Must.”
After fastening the coverall at the neck with its single broken button, Maxim went over to the table and prodded at his breakfast with a two-pronged fork. The usual dialogue ensued.
“I don’t want. Mustn’t.”
“Must. Food. Breakfast.”
“I don’t want. Tastes bad.”
“Must. Breakfast. Tastes good.”
“Fish,” Maxim said to her with sincere feeling, “you’re a cruel person. If you ended up with me on Earth, I’d run myself ragged in order to find you food that you liked.”
“I don’t understand,” she regretfully said. “What is ‘fish’?”
As he queasily chewed on a fatty morsel, Maxim took a piece of paper and drew a bream, viewed head-on. She carefully studied the drawing and put it in the pocket of her robe. She collected all the drawings that Maxim made and carried them off somewhere. Maxim drew a lot, and quite voluntarily. He enjoyed it; during his free time and at night when he couldn’t sleep, there was absolutely nothing to do here. He drew animals and people, traced out tables and diagrams, and reproduced anatomical cross sections. He drew Professor Megu, looking like a hippopotamus, and a hippopotamus looking like Professor Megu. He set out the universal tables of Lincos, Freudenthal’s invented language, and plans of machines, and diagrams of historical sequences; he used up masses of paper, and it all disappeared into Fish’s pocket, but without any apparent consequences for the process of contact. Professor Megu, a.k.a. Hippopotamus, had his own method, and he had no intention of departing from it.
Hippopotamus had taken absolutely no interest in the Lincos universal table, the study of which was supposed to be the starting point for any first contact. Fish was the only one who taught the new arrival the local language, and she only did that in order to make it easier to deal with him, so that he would close the window and not walk around without his coverall. No experts in first contact were involved at all. Maxim was handled by Hippopotamus and only Hippopotamus.
However, Hippopotamus did have at his disposal a rather powerful research tool—mentoscopic technology—and Maxim spent from fourteen to sixteen hours a day in the scanning chair. Moreover, Hippopotamus’s mentoscope was a good one; it allowed him to penetrate rather deeply into a subject’s memories, and it had extremely high-resolution capability. Possessing a machine like this, it might perhaps have been possible to manage without any knowledge of language. But Hippopotamus used his mentoscope in a rather strange manner. He quite categorically, even rather indignantly, refused to display Maxim’s mentograms, and dealt with those mentograms in a quite extraordinary manner. Maxim had deliberately developed an entire program of memories that should have given the indigenous population here a fairly adequate impression of the social, economic, and cultural life of Earth. But mentograms of that kind entirely failed to rouse Hippopotamus’s enthusiasm. He contorted his features into a morose grimace, mumbled, walked away and started making telephone calls, or sat down at the desk and started tediously nagging his assistant, in the process frequently repeating the succulent little word “massaraksh.” But when the screen showed Maxim blowing up an immense ice boulder that had pinned down his ship, or blasting an armored wolf to shreds with his scorcher, or recapturing an express laboratory from a gigantic, stupid pseudo-octopus, it was literally quite impossible to drag Hippopotamus away from the mentoscope, even by the ears. He quietly squealed, gleefully slapped his hands on his bald patch, and menacingly yelled at his exhausted assistant, who was keeping an eye on the recording of the images. The spectacle of a chromospheric prominence threw the professor into raptures as intense as if he had never seen anything of the kind in his life, and he really enjoyed the love scenes, which Maxim had mostly borrowed from movies, in order to give the indigenous population here some impression of the emotional life of humankind.