Snail on the Slope

by Arkady Strugatsky

  "And what will you be doing?"

  "I shall do wood-carving."

  "What else?"

  "I shall write poetry. They will teach me to write poetry. I have good handwriting."

  "What will I do?"

  "Whatever you like!" said the secretary's assistant magnanimously. "Carve wood, write poetry... Whatever you like."

  "I don't want to carve wood. I'm a mathematician."

  "Well all right! Do maths to your heart's content!"

  "I do it now to my heart's content."

  "Now you get paid for doing it. Silly. You'll jump from towers."

  "Why?"

  "There you go - why? It's interesting isn't it?"

  "No."

  "What are you trying to say, then? That apart from mathematics you're not interested in anything?"

  "Well now, that's about right. After a day's work you're so fagged out that you take no interest in anything."

  "You're just a narrow person. Never mind, you'll develop. You'll find you have some aptitudes, you'll be composing music, doing a bit of fretwork, or something..."

  "Composing music isn't the trouble, it's finding an audience."

  "Well, I'll listen to you with pleasure... Pepper here."

  "You just think that. You won't do it though. You'll do a bit of fretwork then you'll be off to join the ladies. Or get drunk. I know you all right, I know everybody here. You'll shamble about from crystal bar to diamond cafeteria. Especially if work is optional. I'm afraid to think, even, what it'll be like if they make work optional here."

  "Every man is a genius at something," retorted the assistant. "You've only to find what it is. We don't even suspect that I'm, say, a genius at cooking, you, perhaps, a pharmaceutical genius, but we have other jobs and find out little about ourselves. The director said specialists would be put on that, they'll bring to light our hidden potential..."

  "Potential, now, that's a murky business. I'm not arguing, maybe everybody's a potential genius, only what's to be done if it can only be applied, say, in the distant past or future, and it isn't regarded as genius now whether you've got it or not? Very good if you're a cooking genius. But how's it going to be discovered that you're a cab-driver of genius, or Pepper's a genius at chipping arrow heads, or I'm a genius at finding an X-field about which nobody knows yet and which won't be discovered for ten years? ... Well then, as the poet said, leisure's black face will turn our way..."

  "Boys," said someone, "we've brought no grub with us. While we're traveling and till they pay us..."

  "Stoyan'll see us all right."

  "Like heck he will. They're on rations there."

  "Never mind, we'll last out. There's the checkpoint already."

  Pepper extended his neck. In front, the forest stood, a yellow-green wall and the road ran straight into it, like a thread going into a multi-colored carpet. The truck passed by a plywood sign:

  ATTENTION! REDUCE SPEED! PREPARE TO SHOW DOCUMENTS!

  The striped bar was already visible; it was lowered and had to the left of it a sentry-box, on the right, barbed wire, white insulators, lattice towers with searchlights. The truck came to a halt. Everybody looked at the guard who was dozing with his carbine under his arm, as he stood cross-legged in his box. An extinguished cigarette hung on his lip and the concrete around the box was littered with ends. Next to the box stood a pole with various admonishments nailed to it:

  ATTENTION! FOREST! DISPLAY PERMITS! DON'T SPREAD INFECTION! The driver hooted tactfully. The guard opened his eyes and stared muz-zily before him, he then detached himself from the box and walked around the lorry.

  "There's plenty of you," said he. "Money, is it?"

  "Right first time," said the former presider.

  "That's fine, good," said the guard. He circled the vehicle, hoisted himself up onto the step and glanced inside. "Gee, there's a lot of you," he said reproachfully. "What about hands? Hands clean?"

  "Yes!" chorused everyone.

  "Everybody?"

  "Everybody."

  "All righty," said the guard, thrusting the top half of his body into the cab. From the cab: "Who's in charge? You? How many you got? Aha ... you telling the truth? Name? Kim? Well now Kirn, I'm writing your surname down... Great, Voldemar! Drive all the time do you? I'm on guard all the time. Show us your pass... Now, now, no snarling, just show us it... Pass in order, otherwise I'd... Why d'you write telephone numbers on your pass? Wait a minute ... what Charlotte is this? Ah yes, I remember. Give it here, I'll write it down as well... Okay, thanks. Drive on. Permission to pass."

  He jumped down from the step, raising the dust as he did so, went over to the barrier, and dropped on the counterweight. The barrier slowly rose, and the long underpants strung along it dropped into the dust. The truck started up.

  There was a hubbub of conversation in the back, but Pepper heard nothing. He was going into the forest. The forest was getting closer, nearing and massing higher and higher, like an ocean wave and suddenly, it swallowed him. There was no more sun and sky, space or time, the forest had taken their place. All there was, was a flickering of murky tints, thick moist air, incredible smells, fumes rather, and an acrid taste in his mouth. Only sound was untouched by the forest: the noises of the forest were overpowered by the roar of the engine and the chatter of the passengers. So here's the forest, Pepper kept repeating, here I am in the forest, he repeated meaninglessly. Not from up above, but inside, not an observer, a participant. Here I am in the forest. Something cool and moist touched his face, ticklish, detached itself and slowly descended to his knees. He looked down: a long, thin, filament of some plant or other, or maybe some animal, or maybe just the contact of the forest, a friendly greeting or a wary feeling out; he did not touch the filament.

  Meanwhile the truck roared along the road of glorious advance; yellow, green and brown meekly sank away behind, while along the verges streamed the untidy, forgotten columns of the veterans of the invading army, black bulldozers upended with shields furiously ripped, tractors buried in the earth as far as the driving-cab, their caterpillar tracks squashed flat and trailing behind them, lorries lacking wheels or glass - everything dead, deserted forever, but maintaining their former fearless gaze ahead, into the depths of the forest with their wrenched radiators and shattered headlights. And all around, the forest stirred, palpitated, and contorted, changing its hues, blurring and flaring up, flowing forward and retreating, deceiving the sight, the forest terrified and mocked and gloated, and it was all strange and it was impossible to describe, and it was nauseating.

  Chapter Six

  Pepper opened the door of the landrover and looked at the thickets. He didn't know what he was supposed to see. Something in the nature of a nauseating blancmange. Something strange, something indescribable. But the most strange, the most unimaginable thing in this undergrowth was the people, therefore Pepper saw only them. They were walking toward the landrover, slender and neat in their movements, confident and elegant, they walked easily, never backtracking, instantly choosing the exact place to step. They acted as if they didn't notice the forest, as if they were at home in it and the forest belonged to them. They weren't pretending even, they really did think that, and the forest hung above them silently laughing and pointing with myriads of jeering fingers, while adroitly contriving to be familiar, obedient and simple - absolutely trustworthy. Until the time, the day...

  "Oh what a wench, that Rita," said former driver Acey to Pepper. He was standing next to the landrover, his somewhat bandy legs set wide across a rasping and trembling motorcycle, which he held lightly with his thighs. "I'd have got my hands on her for sure if it wasn't for her Quentin, he's a sharp one."

  Quentin and Rita had approached quite close and Stoyan climbed out from behind the wheel to meet them.

  "Well, how is she?" asked Stoyan. "Breathing," said Quentin, closely studying Pepper. "Has the money arrived, then?"

  "This is Pepper," said Stoyan. "I was telling you."

  Rita and Que
ntin smiled at Pepper. There was no time to study them but the thought crossed Pepper's mind that he had never seen a stranger woman than Rita or a more deeply unhappy man than Quentin.

  "Hello, Pepper," said Quentin, continuing to smile piteously. "Come to have a look? Never seen it before?"

  "I don't see it now," said Pepper. And it was true, the unhappiness and the strangeness were impossible to pin down, though linked powerfully.

  Rita lit a cigarette and turned away. "You're looking in the wrong direction, man. Look straight ahead of you. Don't tell me you can't see?"

  Then Pepper did see and at once forgot about the people. It had appeared like a hidden image on photographic paper, like a figure in a child's puzzle picture "where is the rabbit hiding" and once having found it, it was impossible to lose it from view. It was very close, it began ten paces from the landrover's wheels and the path. Pepper shuddered and swallowed.

  A living column rose to treetop level, a sheaf of thin transparent threads, sticky, shiny, writhing and tense, a sheaf penetrating the dense foliage and climbing farther and farther into the clouds. It had its origin in a cesspit, an oily gurgling cesspit, full up with protoplasm, living, active, swelling up in bubbles of primitive flesh, busily organizing and as quickly decaying, pouring out the products of decay onto its flat banks spitting gluey foam... And at once, as if unseen sound-filters had been switched on, the voice of the cesspit stood out from the chugging of the motorbike: gurgling, splashing, sobbing, bubbling, long drawn-out swamp groans; a heavy wall of smells drew nearer of raw sweating meat, pus, fresh bile, serum, hot paste - only then did Pepper notice that both Rita and Quentin had oxygen masks hanging on their chests; he saw Stoyan squeamishly grimacing and raising a respirator to his face. He himself did not start putting his respirator on, he was somehow hoping that the smells might tell him what his eyes and ears had failed to do...

  "It stinks around here," said Acey, revolted. "Like a morgue..."

  Quentin was talking to Stoyan.

  "You might have asked Kim to see about our rations. We should get danger money. We're due milk, chocolate..."

  Rita was smoking pensively, dribbling smoke through her thin mobile nostrils...

  Around the cesspit, bending tenderly over it, trembled the trees; their branches were all turned in one direction and drooped toward the seething mass, while along the branches thick hairy lianas wriggled and dropped into the cesspit. The cesspit took them to itself and the protoplasm gnawed around them and converted them into itself, as it could dissolve and make its own all that surrounded it...

  "Peppy," said Stoyan, "don't goggle like that, your eyes'll pop out."

  Pepper smiled, though he knew it looked forced.

  "Why did you bring the motorbike, anyway?" asked Quentin.

  "In case we got stranded. They crawl along the path - I go with one wheel on the path, the other on the grass, and the motorbike goes behind. If we get stuck, Acey nips off on the bike and gets a tractor."

  "You'll get stuck for sure," said Quentin.

  "Course we will," said Acey. "This is a stupid idea, I've said so all along."

  "You just be quiet," Stoyan said to him. "Your part is small enough... Is the eruption soon?" he asked Quentin.

  Quentin looked at his watch.

  "Well now..." he said. "It reproduces every eighty-seven minutes. So in ... in ... in nothing, there, she's starting already."

  The cesspit was reproducing. Out onto its level banks, in a series of convulsive jerks, came spurting out one after another, bits of whitish rippling goo. They rolled along the earth, helpless and blind, then stopped, flattened out, threw out cautious pseudopodia and suddenly began moving purposefully - still fussing, still prodding about, but now in one set direction, wandering from the direct path, now and again colliding, but in one set direction, along one radius from the womb, out into the thickets, on and out in a single flowing off-white column, like gigantic clumsy, slug-like ants...

  "It's a quagmire all around here," Acey was saying. "We'll plop in so deep no tractor'll ever get us out - the ropes'll just snap."

  "Do you want to come with us?" said Stoyan to Quentin.

  "Rita's tired."

  "Rita can go home and we'll push on..." Quentin was wavering. "How d'you feel, Rita, dear?" he asked. "Yes, I'll go on home," said Rita. "Well, that's fine," Quentin said. "We'll go and take a look eh? We'll be back soon enough I expect. Not long,eh, Stoyan?"

  Rita threw away her cigarette end and went off along the track toward the biostation, without saying good-bye. Quentin shuffled in indecision before saying to Pepper in an undertone:

  "Allow me ... get past..."

  He pushed through into the back seat; at which moment the motorbike with tremendous roar, tore itself from under Acey and bounding high in the air, hurtled into the cesspit. "Stop!" Acey shouted, as he sank to his haunches. "Where are you off to?" Everybody froze. The bike raced over a hummock, squealing wildly, stood on end and fell into the pit. Everybody rushed forward. Pepper thought the protoplasm rose up under the bike, softening the blow; then it easily and soundlessly accepted it and closed over it. The motorbike shut off.

  "Clumsy bastard," said Stoyan to Acey. "What the devil are you doing?"

  The cesspit had become a maw, sucking, tasting, enjoying. It was rolling the machine around inside, the way a man rolls a mint from cheek to cheek with his tongue. The motorcycle was swirling around in the foaming mass, now disappearing, now surfacing, helplessly waving its handlebars; with every appearance it got smaller and smaller, its metal plating thinner and thinner, now transparent as thin paper. Already the engine innards could be glimpsed through it, then the plating melted away, the tires disappeared, the bike dived down for the last time and appeared no more.

  "Swallowed it," said Acey with idiotic joy.

  "Clumsy bastard," repeated Stoyan. "You'll pay me for that. You'll be paying me the rest of your life for it."

  "Well all right then," said Acey. "So I'll pay for it! Was it my fault? I just turned the throttle the wrong way," he said to Pepper. "That's how it got away. I really wanted to throttle down, Monsieur Pepper, so it didn't rattle so much, well I just turned it the wrong way. I'm not the first or the last to do that. Anyway it was an old bike... I'm off then," said he to Stoyan. "I'm no use here now. I'll go home."

  "Where are your eyes wandering then?" Quentin said abruptly with an expression that caused Pepper to step aside involuntarily.

  "What's the matter?" said Acey. "I look where I want."

  He was looking back at the path, where Rita's orange wrap was flickering under the dense yellowy-green awning of branches as she receded.

  "Come on, let me pass," said Quentin to Pepper. "I'll just have a word with him."

  "Where're you going, d'you think?" mumbled Stoyan. "Think on, Quentin..."

  "What d'you mean, think on? I've known what he was after long enough..."

  "Listen, don't be a kid... Just stop it! Just think on!"

  "Let go, I tell you, let go my arm!"

  There was a noisy struggle around Pepper who was being shoved from both sides. Stoyan held Quentin's jacket firmly by the back and sleeve, as Quentin, now red and sweating, keeping his eyes fixed on Acey, was fending off Stoyan with one hand while bending Pepper double with the other in his attempt to step over him. He was jerking about and emerging farther from his jacket with each jerk. Pepper chose this moment to tumble out of the landrover. Acey was still looking after Rita, his mouth half-open, his eyes lustful and tender.

  "What's she doing wearing trousers," said he to Pepper. "It's the latest craze they've got, going about in trousers..."

  "Don't defend him!" roared Quentin in the car. "He's not a sexual neurasthenic, he's just a bastard! Let me go, or I'll give you one as well!"

  "They used to wear skirts," said Acey dreamily. "A piece of material wrapped around and fixed with a pin. And I would get hold of the pin and unloose..."

  If this had been in the park... If it had been
in the hostel or the library or the assembly hall... And it had been - in the park, the library and even in the assembly hall during Kirn's lecture on "What all Directorate personnel should know about methods of mathematical statistics." But now the forest was seeing it all and hearing it all - the lascivious obscenity that filled Acey's eyes, Quentin's purple face swaying in the van doorway, some dull, ox-like, droning mumble of Stoy-an's, something about work, responsibility, stupidity and the crack of flying buttons against the windshield ... and its reaction couldn't be guessed, whether it was one of horror, amusement or a fastidious grimace. " - " said Acey with satisfaction. And Pepper hit him. Hit him on the cheekbone apparently, with a crunch, spraining his finger. Everybody stopped talking at once. Acey held his cheek and looked at Pepper in vast astonishment.

  "Don't say things like that," said Pepper firmly. "Not here. Don't do it."

  "Well I'm not arguing," Acey said with a shrug. "I only meantthat I'm doing no good here, haven't got a

  motorbike you can see that... So what good can I do here?"

  Quentin inquired loudly:

  "You want one across the jaw?"

  'There you are," said Acey, vexed. "Right across the cheekbone, right on the bone... Good job, you missed my eye."