Maxim felt himself grabbed across the torso and pulled downward. He bent down and saw Gai’s idiotically goggling eyes. Like the other time, in the bomber, Gai kept trying to catch Maxim in his arms, all the time muttering something. His face had become repulsive; there was neither boyishness nor naive courage left in it—only obdurate imbecility and the readiness to become a killer. It’s started, thought Maxim, squeamishly attempting to push the hapless young man away. It’s started, it’s started . . . They’ve turned on the radiation emitters, it’s started . . .
The tank scrambled up onto the crest, shuddering, with clods of turf flying out from under its caterpillar tracks. The blue-gray smoke obscured everything behind it, but ahead a gray, clayey plain suddenly opened up, and in the distance the flat hills on the Hontian side heaved into view, with an avalanche of tanks hurtling toward them, maintaining their speed. There were no rows any longer—all the tanks were rushing along, racing each other, brushing against each other, senselessly rotating their turrets . . .
A caterpillar tread flew off one tank traveling at full speed and the tank started spinning around on the spot and overturned; its other caterpillar track flew off and went soaring up into the sky like a heavy, glittering snake, the lead wheels kept on furiously spinning, and two little figures in gray popped out of the lower hatches, jumped down onto the ground, and ran forward, waving their arms around—forward, only forward, at the perfidious enemy . . .
There was a flash of fire, the sharp crack of a shot from a tank gun burst through all the clanging and roaring, and all the tanks started firing at once; long, red tongues of flame shot out of their gun barrels, the tanks squatted back and jumped up again, they were enveloped in the dense, black smoke of coarse gunpowder, and a minute later everything was obscured by a blackish-yellow cloud, and Maxim kept watching, unable to tear his eyes away from this spectacle that was so colossal in its criminality, patiently peeling away Gai’s tenacious hands, while Gai kept pulling at him, calling out, imploring, craving to shield Maxim from every danger with his own chest . . . Men, windup dolls, savage beasts . . . Men.
Then Maxim came to his senses. It was time to take over the controls. Holding on to the metal rungs, he went down inside, on the way slapping Gai on the shoulder—Gai started thrashing about in hysterical ecstasy. Maxim looked around in the cramped, lurching box, almost choking on the stench of gasoline, made out Fank’s deathly pale face, with its eyes rolled up and back, and Zef huddled up under a shell crate. He shoved aside Gai, who was devotedly clinging to him, and squeezed through to the driver.
Hook was jerking the levers back, putting on as much speed as he could. He was singing, yelling in such an appalling voice that he could actually be heard, and Maxim even made out the words of the Song of Thanksgiving. Now he had to somehow pacify Hook, take his place, and find a convenient ravine, or a deep hollow, or some kind of hill in all this smoke, so they would have somewhere to take shelter against atomic explosions . . .
But things didn’t go to plan. The moment he started cautiously unclasping Hook’s fists, which had frozen onto the levers, his devoted slave Gai, seeing his lord being defied, pushed his way in from the side and dealt the crazed Hook a terrible blow on the temple with a huge spanner. Hook slumped down, went limp, and let go of the levers. With savage fury, Maxim flung Gai aside, but it was already too late, and there was no time to feel horror and sympathy. He dragged the corpse out of the way, sat down, and took the controls.
He could see almost nothing through the observation hatch, just a small patch of clayey soil with a sparse covering of blades of grass, and beyond that a blank shroud of bluish-gray fumes. Finding anything in that was out of the question. There was only one thing left to do—slow down and keep cautiously moving while the tank traveled deeper into the hills. However, slowing down was dangerous too. If the atomic mines started exploding before he reached the hills, he could be blinded, or even completely incinerated.
Gai rubbed up against him from the right and the left, peering into his face, petitioning for orders. “It’s all right, old buddy . . .” Maxim muttered, elbowing him away. “It will pass . . . Everything will pass, everything will be fine . . .” Gai saw that Maxim was talking to him and shed a mortified tear, because once again, like the time in the bomber, he couldn’t hear a word.
The tank shot through a dense trail of black smoke—on their left a tank was on fire. They hurtled past it and had to abruptly swerve to the right, to avoid driving over a dead man squashed flat by caterpillar tracks. A crooked border sign emerged from the smoke and disappeared again, followed by tattered, crumpled tangles of barbed wire. A man in a strange white helmet stuck his head up for a moment out of an inconspicuous little ditch, furiously waved his fists in the air, and immediately disappeared, as if he had dissolved into the ground.
The shroud of smoke ahead thinned out a little, and Maxim saw round, brownish hills, very close, and the mud-spattered side of a tank that for some reason was creeping diagonally across the general movement, and then another blazing tank. Maxim steered away to the left, aiming his tank into a deep saddle, overgrown with bushes, between two of the slightly higher hills. He was already close when flames came spurting out toward him, and the entire tank rang from a terrible blow. In his surprise, Maxim switched to full speed ahead, the bushes and the cloud of white smoke hanging over them leaped toward him, he glimpsed white helmets, faces contorted in hatred, raised fists, and then something gave a metallic crack as it broke under his tank’s caterpillar tracks.
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 b
e 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.
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.
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 li
ttle 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 . . .
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