The Inhabited Island

by Arkady Strugatsky

  They tramped another mile or so to the strains of that march, and all the while Gai kept wondering how they ought to behave if a patrol did spot them after all, and after he thought of the answer, he expounded his ideas to Maxim. “If they discover us,” he said, “we’ll lie and say the degenerates kidnapped me and you pursued them and freed me, and the two of us have been wandering around in the forest, and today we reached this place.”

  “But what will that do for us?” Maxim asked, without any particular enthusiasm.

  “What it will do for us,” said Gai, starting to get angry, “is at least stop them from whacking us on the spot.”

  “Oh, no,” Maxim firmly replied, “I’m not letting anyone whack me again, or you either.”

  “But what if it’s a tank?” Gai asked in admiration.

  “A tank—so what?” said Maxim. “A tank’s no big deal . . .” He paused for a while and said, “You know, it would be good if we captured a tank.” Gai could see that this idea was very much to his liking. “That’s an excellent idea of yours, Gai,” said Maxim. “And that’s what we’ll do. Capture a tank. As soon as they show up, you immediately fire a burst into the air from your rifle, and I’ll put my hands behind my back, and you escort me straight toward them. And what happens after that is my concern, but you be careful to keep well out of it, don’t get in the way of my hand, and especially don’t do any more shooting.”

  Gai got all fired up at the idea and suggested walking along the dunes so that they could see the tanks from a distance. So that was what they did, climbed up onto the dunes. And immediately they spotted a white submarine.

  Behind the dunes they saw a small, shallow bay, and the submarine was jutting up out of the water about a hundred yards from the shore. It actually didn’t look anything like a submarine, especially not a white one. Gai thought at first that it was either the carcass of some gigantic two-humped animal or a freakishly shaped rock that had mysteriously risen up out of the sand. But Maxim immediately realized what it was. He even surmised that the submarine was abandoned, that it had been standing here for several years and had been sucked into the sand. And that was exactly the way it was. When they reached the bay and walked down to the water, Gai saw that the long hull and the two superstructures were covered with rusty blotches, the white paint had peeled away, the artillery platform was twisted sideways, and the gun was staring down into the water. There were gaping black holes with scorched edges in the metal plating—nothing could have remained alive inside it, of course.

  “Is this definitely a white submarine?” Maxim asked. “Have you seen them before?

  “Yes, I think so,” Gai replied. “I’ve never served on the coast, but they showed us photographs and mentograms . . . they described them . . . There was even an educational film, Tanks in Coastal Defense. This is a submarine. It obviously must have been carried into the bay by a storm, got stranded on a shoal, and then a patrol showed up . . . Do you see how battered it is? That plating’s like a sieve . . .”

  “Yes, it looks like that,” Maxim murmured, peering at the vessel. “Shall we go and take a look?”

  Gai hesitated. “Well, of course, we could,” he hesitantly said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, how can I put it . . .”

  Yes indeed, how could he put it? Corporal Serembesh, a brave tank soldier, had once told Gai, in a dark barracks after lights-out, that it wasn’t ordinary sailors who sailed in white submarines—dead sailors sailed in them, serving their second term, and some of them were cowards who had died in a state of fear, and they were serving out their first term . . . The sea demons groped about on the bottom of the sea, caught the drowned men, and filled the crews with them . . . Gai couldn’t tell Mak something like that—Mak would laugh at him, and Gai didn’t think this was a laughing matter . . .

  Or take, for instance, acting private Leptu, demoted from officer’s rank. When he got drunk in the canteen, he often used to say, “That’s all just nonsense, guys—all those degenerates and mutants of yours, and the radiation, you can deal with all that, you can survive it—but you just pray that God never lands you on a white submarine. Better to drown outright, guys, than even touch the thing, I ought to know . . .” Nobody knew anything about why Leptu had been demoted, but previously he had served on the coast and commanded a patrol boat . . .

  “You know,” Gai fervidly said, “there are all sorts of superstitions, all sorts of legends . . . I won’t tell you about them, but Cornet Chachu, for instance, said that all the submarines were infected and it was forbidden to board them . . . they say there’s even an official order about that, about crippled submarines . . .”

  “OK,” said Maxim. “You stay here, and I’ll go. Let’s see what kind of contagion there is in there.”

  Gai didn’t have time to say a word—before he could even open his mouth, Maxim had already jumped into the water. He dived and didn’t reappear for long time—Gai even started gasping in anxiety as he waited for him—and then Maxim’s black-haired head appeared alongside the flaking hull, directly below a shell hole. Nimbly and effortlessly, like a fly climbing up a wall, the brown figure scrambled up the slanting deck, flew up onto the bow superstructure, and disappeared. Gai convulsively sighed and loitered on the spot for a while before he started strolling back and forth along the water’s edge, keeping his eyes fixed on the dead, rusty monster.

  It was quiet; in this dead bay even the waves weren’t murmuring. A blank white sky, lifeless white dunes, everything dry, hot, and absolutely still. Gai cast a look full of hate at the rusty carcass, unable to believe his sheer bad luck: other guys served for years and never saw any submarines, but he and Mak had just tumbled down out of the sky, strode along for an hour or so, and there it was: Welcome . . . How did I ever decide to do such a thing? It’s all Mak’s fault. When he says something, it all sounds so fine, as if there’s nothing even to think about, and nothing to be afraid of . . . Or maybe I wasn’t afraid because I imagined a white submarine as something alive and white, neat and trim, with sailors on the deck, dressed all in white . . . But this is an iron corpse . . . and this place is so dead, there isn’t even any wind . . .

  But there was a wind, I definitely remember: as we were walking along, the wind was blowing in my face, a refreshing little breeze . . . Gai longingly looked around, then sat down on the sand, laid his rifle beside him, and started indecisively tugging off his right boot. Can you believe this silence! And what if he doesn’t come back at all? What if this lousy iron bastard has swallowed him up without leaving a single trace? . . . Oh, damn it, damn it, damn it!

  He shuddered and dropped his boot; a terrifying, long, drawn-out sound had rung out across the bay, something between a howl and a screech, as if devils had scraped a rusty knife across a sinful soul. Oh Lord, it was just an iron hatch opening, a hatch that had rusted closed . . . Damn it, I’ve broken into a sweat! He opened a hatch, so now he’ll climb out . . . No, he isn’t climbing out.

  For several minutes Gai craned his neck, looking at the submarine and listening. Silence. The same terrible silence, even more terrible after that rusty howl . . . Or maybe he . . . maybe the hatch didn’t open but close? It closed itself . . . A vision arose before Gai’s blank, lifeless eyes: a heavy steel door closing itself behind Maxim, and the heavy bolt sliding shut on its own . . . Gai licked his dry lips, gulped with a dry throat, and shouted, “Hey, Mak!” But it wasn’t a shout . . . merely a hiss, that was all . . . Oh Lord, if I could just make some kind of sound! “Heeey,” he howled in desperation. “Heeey . . .” the dunes somberly replied, and everything went quiet again.

  Silence. And he didn’t have the strength to shout again . . .

  Keeping his eyes fixed on the submarine, Gai groped for his rifle, released the safety catch with a trembling finger, and fired a burst into the bay without aiming at anything. There was just a brief, powerless crackling sound, as if he had fired into cotton. Little fountains spurted up on the smooth su
rface and circles started spreading out. Gai raised the barrel higher and pressed the trigger again. This time the sound was right: the rattle of bullets on metal, the whine of ricochets, the sharp smack of the echo. And then nothing. Not a single thing. Not another sound, as if he were here all alone, as if he had always been alone. As if he had ended up here in some mysterious way, been transported here, into this dead place, in a delirious dream, unable to wake up or shake off his trance. And now he would have to stay here alone forever.

  Absolutely frantic, just as he was, in one boot, Gai waded into the water. Slowly at first, raising his feet high, until he was up to his waist in water, then faster and faster, almost starting to run, sobbing and swearing out loud. The rusty hulk came closer. Alternately plodding along, stroking his arms through the water, and flinging himself forward to swim, Gai reached the side of the vessel and tried to scramble up, but he couldn’t. He circled around the stern of the submarine, grabbed hold of some cables or other, and scrambled up, skinning his hands and knees, onto the deck, where he stopped, weeping floods of tears. It was absolutely clear to him that Maxim was dead. “Heeey,” he shouted in a strangled voice. Silence.

  The deck was empty; dried-out seaweed was stuck all over the perforated iron, as if it were overgrown with matted hair. The bow superstructure hung over his head like an immense spotted mushroom, and a wide, jagged scar gaped open in the armor plating to one side of him. With his boot clattering on the iron deck, Gai circled around the superstructure and saw iron rungs leading upward, still damp. Slinging his rifle behind his back, he started climbing. He climbed for a long time, for an eternity, in stifling silence, toward inevitable death, toward eternal death. He scrambled up and then froze there, on all fours.

  The monster was already waiting for him. The hatch cover was wide open, as if it hadn’t been closed for a hundred years and even the hinges had rusted in place again: Do please come in! Gai crawled to the black, gaping gullet, glanced in, and his head started spinning and he felt nauseous . . . Silence was welling up out of that iron throat in a compact mass, years and years of stagnant, musty silence, and Gai suddenly imagined his good friend Mak down there in the yellow, putrefied light, crushed under those tons of silence, fighting for his life, alone against them all, fighting with his final ounces of strength and calling out, “Gai! Gai!”—but the grinning silence languidly swallowed up those words, leaving not a trace behind, and kept bearing down on Mak, pinning him down, crushing him. It was absolutely unbearable, and Gai climbed into the hatchway.

  Weeping, he tried to hurry, and finally he fell and went clattering downward, falling several yards before he landed on sand. He was in an iron corridor, feebly lit by widely spaced, dusty little lightbulbs; over years and years, fine sand had drifted in and built up at the bottom of the shaft. Gai jumped to his feet—he was still hurrying, still terribly afraid of being too late—and he ran without thinking about where he was going, shouting, “I’m here, Mak . . . I’m coming . . . I’m coming . . .”

  “Why are you shouting like that?” Mak asked in a grouchy voice, seeming to thrust his head straight out of the wall. “What’s happened? Have you cut your finger?”

  Gai halted and dropped his arms. He was on the verge of fainting and had to lean against a bulkhead. His heart was furiously pounding, the blows thundered in his ears like a drum tattoo, and he couldn’t control his voice.

  Maxim looked at him in amazement for a moment, then he must have understood: he squeezed through into the corridor—the bulkhead door screeched again with a piercing note—walked up to Gai, took him by the shoulders, shook him, pulled him close, and hugged him, and for a few seconds Gai lay there on his chest in blissful oblivion, gradually recovering his wits. “I thought . . . you’d been . . . that you’d . . .”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Maxim said in a soothing voice. “It’s my fault, I should have called you at once. But there are some strange things in here, you know . . .”

  Gai pulled away, wiped his nose with his wet sleeve, then wiped his face with his wet hand, and only then started feeling ashamed. “You were gone for ages and ages!” he furiously exclaimed. “I called, I fired my gun. . . Is it really so hard to answer?”

  “Massaraksh, I didn’t hear anything,” Maxim guiltily said. “You know, there’s a magnificent radio in here . . . I didn’t know they could make such powerful ones in these parts.”

  “A radio, a radio . . .” Gai muttered, squeezing in through the half-open door. “You’re amusing yourself in here, and meanwhile someone’s almost gone insane worrying about you . . . What is all this?”

  It was a rather spacious room with a rotted carpet on the floor and three semicircular lamps on the ceiling, only one of which was lit. A round table stood at the center of the space, with chairs around it. Strange-looking framed photographs and pictures were hanging on the walls, from which the tattered remains of velvet upholstery dangled. A large radio was crackling and howling in the corner—Gai had never seen one like it before.

  “This is something like a mess room,” said Maxim. “Walk around and take a look, there’s plenty to look at in here.”

  “What about the crew?” asked Gai.

  “There’s nobody here. Neither alive nor dead. The lower compartments are flooded. I think they’re all in there.”

  Gai looked at him in amazement, but Maxim turned away with a preoccupied expression on his face. “I have to tell you,” he said, “it looks like it’s a good thing that we didn’t reach the Empire in that plane. Just take a look, take a look . . .” He sat down at the radio and started twisting the tuning knobs.

  Gai looked around, not knowing where to begin, then walked over to the wall and started examining the photographs hanging there. For a while he couldn’t understand what they were photographs of, then he realized that they were X-rays. Looking out at him were nebulous skulls, all of them with identical grins. Every image had an indecipherable inscription, as if someone had signed them. Members of the crew? Celebrities of some kind or other? Gai shrugged. Maybe Uncle Kaan could make some kind of sense of this, but we’re just simple folk . . .

  In the farthest corner he saw a large, bright poster, a poster in three colors that was quite beautiful, even though it had been attacked by mold . . . The poster showed a blue sea and a handsome orange man in an unfamiliar uniform emerging from the sea, with one foot already poised on the black shoreline; he was very muscular, with a disproportionately small head, half of which consisted of his powerful neck. In one hand the mighty hero was clutching a scroll with an incomprehensible inscription, and with the other he was thrusting a blazing torch into the land. The torch was setting fire to a city, and repulsive-looking freaks were writhing in the flames, while dozens of other freaks were fleeing on their hands and knees in various directions. Something was written in large, orange letters in the upper part of the poster; the letters were familiar, the same ones that Gai was used to, but the words they made up were absolutely unpronounceable.

  The longer Gai looked at the poster, the less he liked it. For some reason he remembered a poster in their barracks that showed a bold guardsman like a black eagle (also with a very small head and powerful muscles) bravely shearing off the head of a repulsive orange snake that had thrust itself up out of the sea with a gigantic pair of scissors. He recalled that there were words inscribed on the blades of the scissors: on one it said BATTLE GUARDS, and on the other OUR GLORIOUS ARMY. “Aha,” Gai said to himself, casting a final glance at the poster. “We’ll see about that . . . We’ll see who singes who, massaraksh!”

  He turned away from the poster and stopped dead.

  Staring at him with glass eyes from an elegant varnished shelf was a familiar face—square, with light-brown bangs above the eyebrows and a conspicuous scar on the right cheek . . . Cornet Pudurash, a national hero, the commander of a company in the Dead but Unforgotten Brigade, the destroyer of eleven white submarines, who had perished while waging battle against overwhelming odd
s. His portrait, surmounted by a bouquet of immortelle flowers, hung in every barracks, his bust adorned every parade ground . . . but for some reason his shriveled head, with dead, yellow skin, was here. Gai stepped back. Yes, it was an absolutely genuine head. And there was another head—an unfamiliar, sharp-featured face . . . And another head . . . and another . . .

  “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 . . .