“What’s that formation called?” he asked into the microphone.
“What formation?” Boris Emelianovich’s voice asked, distorted by the earphones.
“When the tanks are all in a single line. If it was soldiers it would just be called a line, but what’s it called for tanks?”
“I don’t know,” said Boris Emelianovich. “It’s always like that after lunch—we just all come out together. You’d do better to count how many tanks there are.”
“Twenty-six,” Sasha counted.
“Fair enough. Babarakin’s out sick, Skovorodich is in Austria, and the rest are all here. It’s going to be hot today.”
“Twenty-one, twenty-one, who’s that you’re talking to?” said a voice in the helmet phones.
“Twenty-one here, twenty-one calling seventeen, come in.”
“Seventeen here.”
“Seventeen, I’ve got a young guy from State Supplies here, he needs to get a piece of paper signed. This way he doesn’t have to go all the way across town.”
“Understood, twenty-one,” replied the voice. “At the farm in ten minutes.”
Boris Emelianovich’s tank turned sharply to the right and Sasha was jolted in the turret. Taking several ruts at full speed, Boris Emelianovich moved out onto the highway, turned and set off at about eighty miles an hour toward a distant grove of trees where the road forked at some kind of sign hanging on a post.
“Climb up the turret,” ordered Boris Emelianovich, “and close the door. There’s a grenade launcher sitting up on that hill over there.”
Sasha followed orders—and just in time: there was a blow against the tank’s armor plating and a loud, sharp, whining sound.
“There he is, the bastard,” Boris Emelianovich’s voice whispered in the earphones, and the turret began slowly turning to the right. On the sighting screen Sasha saw a small square positioned on the top of the hill and the words “gun locked.” But Boris Emelianovich was in no hurry to fire.
“Go on!” Sasha said under his breath.
“Wait,” whispered Boris Emelianovich, “lei me get a shrapnel shell loaded... We’ll need the armor-piercing shells later.”
Once again there was a whining sound and something hit the armor plating. Then the next moment the Abrams cannon barked and a huge black and red tree sprang up on the top of the hill. Soon a farm surrounded by a low fence appeared to the left of the highway and began rushing rapidly toward them—it looked like an abandoned government dacha. Boris Emelianovich braked three hundred yards short, and so sharply that Sasha, who was gazing into the sights, would probably have gotten a black eye if not for the soft rubber surrounding the eyepieces.
“I don’t like the look of that window,” said Boris Emelianovich, “now just let me...”
The turret turned to the left and once again the cannon barked. The farm was shrouded in smoke and flame, and when the air cleared all that was left of the comfortable two-story house was a smoke-blackened foundation and a small piece of wall, in which an open door led into mysterious space. For good measure Boris Emelianovich gave a long burst on the machine gun, shooting through several boards in the fence, and then drove slowly up to the farm.
“You can get out and stretch your legs for a while,” he said to Sasha, when the tank stopped at the burnt-out ruin. “It all seems quiet enough.”
Sasha climbed out of the turret, jumped down to the ground, and turned his head to and fro. There was a buzzing in his ears, his knees were trembling, and he felt he wanted to grab hold of a handrail like the ones inside the turret.
“Feeling a bit strange?” Boris Emelianovich asked in a friendly voice. “You should try it five days a week, eight hours a day, or all on your own with three T-70S at a time moving against you. That’ll make your knees shake. This is a quiet spot, paradise.”
It really was a beautiful spot—tall trees stood here and there in the even field, and Sasha could hear the birds chattering in the green grove beyond the highway. The sun came out from behind a cloud and everything assumed the gentle hues that are only to be seen on a well-tuned VGA monitor assembled in Europe or America—but never on a Korean model, let alone a monitor from Singapore. There was a roaring sound from the direction of the highway.
“Pavel Semyonovich is on his way. Get your document ready.”
The black dot on the highway was approaching rapidly and soon it had turned into a tank exactly like Boris Emelianovich’s, except for the howitzer sticking up above its turret. The tank drove up and stopped, and out of the turret jumped a thin, gloomy-looking soldier wearing gold-framed spectacles and a black pilot’s jacket.
“Let’s see what you’ve got there,” he said to Sasha. Then he squatted on one knee beside a sheet of roofing metal torn away by the shell blast, placed Sasha’s piece of paper on the flat section, and wrote on the top of it “No objection.”
“And as for you, Boris,” he said to Boris Emelianovich, “no more of this. You’ve always got some kind of fucking nonsense to be dealt with just before battle.”
“Never mind,” said Boris Emelianovich, “we’ll catch up. This young guy’s as good a mechanic as Itakin, he got my engine going in a second.”
The gloomy soldier glanced at Sasha under his eyebrows, but he said nothing. They heard a roaring sound approaching rapidly from the direction of the distant blue hills on the horizon. Sasha looked up and saw a squadron of F-15s hedge-hopping toward them. They flew just above the tanks, and the lead pilot, who had a red eagle’s head drawn on his wing, performed a roll only fifty feet above the ground, then shot up almost vertically in a steep climb; the others divided into two groups and, gaining height, set off toward the distant mountain with the truncated summit. For the second time that day Sasha had the feeling that something had happened to him before—perhaps a bit differently, but it had happened, he was sure of it.
“Not a single Mig will stick its nose out today,” said Boris Emelianovich. “Kuzma Ulyanovich is in the air. That’s his plane with the eagle. You can leave your howitzer here.”
“I’ll hang onto it for a while,” answered his morose companion. Somewhere in the distance by the mountain there was a flash and they heard a rumble.
“It’s begun,” said the gloomy soldier. “Time to be going.”
“I brought you a howitzer just like that,” said Sasha, remembering the diskette he had in his pocket and taking it out.
But Boris Emelianovich was already lowering himself into the tank.
“No time now. Give it to Itakin.”
One turret door clanged shut, then the other, and the tanks sprang into motion, throwing up clods of earth with their caterpillar tracks. Sasha watched them move away until they were just two dots and then walked toward the farm, where the two transparent torches he had noticed some time ago were blazing by the door in the only wall which was still standing.
Level 7
When the door closed behind him, Sasha realized that at last he had got out of the underground labyrinth and was now somewhere in the interior palace chambers. The walls around him no longer consisted of crudely hewn stone blocks, but of fine openwork arches, supported on light carved columns. The ceilings receded upward into twilight, the bright southern stars twinkled in the black velvet sky outside the windows, and even the torches on the walls burned in a different way—without any crackling or sooty smoke. There were two identical lowered portcullises, one on each side of Sasha. Patterned Persian carpets were hanging on the wall above his head—yet another thing he had never seen on the lower levels. He moved toward the portcullis on the left, in front of which the slab controlling the lifting mechanism protruded slightly above the floor; but when he stood on it, it was the portcullis behind his back that began to rise.
Sasha spun around and ran back that way. Beyond the portcullis the path divided. He could jump, draw himself up, and run on—there were several body-scissors clanking away and that meant there was a jar hidden somewhere close by, maybe even two—that had happene
d once on the third level. On the other hand, he could go down the steps, and after hesitating for a second, that was what he decided to do.
At the bottom of the steps was the beginning of a long gallery with a mural running in a narrow strip along the wall. Torches were smoking in the bronze rings screwed into the wall and up ahead, guarding the entrance to a staircase, stood a guard in a scarlet caftan, with a curling mustache, holding a long sword. Down in the bottom right corner of the screen Sasha noticed the six triangles that indicated the life force of his opponent, and he turned cold at the sight; he’d never encountered anything like that before. The most he’d seen so far was four triangles. Sasha took out the sword he had found once beside a heap of human bones, and assumed the position. The warrior began to approach, gazing straight into his eyes, and stamping his green Morocco-leather boot on the stone slabs. Suddenly he lunged with incredible speed and Sasha barely managed to deflect his sword using the
“Hi there, Sasha!” said a voice behind his back.
Sasha felt a sharp surge of hatred for the unknown idiot who had decided to distract him with conversation at such a moment, feigned a lunge, then aimed his sword directly at his enemy’s throat and sprang forward. Once again the warrior in the scarlet caftan had time to leap back.
“Sasha!”
Sasha felt someone’s hands turning him around bodily on his revolving chair, and he almost stuck his sword into the person who appeared in front of him. It was Petya Itakin. He was wearing a green sweater and old jeans, which surprised Sasha greatly, given what he knew of the etiquette at Gosplan.
“Let’s talk,” said Itakin.
Sasha glanced at the little figure frozen motionless on the screen.
“I’ve been waiting for you for an hour,” he said. “I started up your boss’ Abrams for him.”
“I’ve seen it already,” said Itakin. “Five minutes ago a T-70 got him right on the turret. He’s come in for repairs.”
Sasha stood up and followed his friend out into the corridor. Every now and then Petya jumped over something, and at one point he dropped to the floor and froze. Sasha noticed a huge blue eye that drifted over their heads and guessed it must be the third or fourth stage in the game Tower. He’d once gotten halfway up the first tower, but when he heard that after you climbed the first tower you had to start on the second and nobody had any idea what came after that, he gave up and became the Prince instead. Petya had been climbing his tower for well over a year at this stage. They went out onto the staircase, where Petya deftly dodged something like a flying boomerang, and then onto the long, empty balcony, with its heaps of sun-bleached stands bearing colored photographs of pale and flabby faces. Sasha tested the floor with his feet—there didn’t seem to be any suspicious slabs. Petya leaned his elbows on the rail of the balcony and gazed at the lights of the city below.
“What is it?” asked Sasha.
“Okay,” said Petya, “I’m leaving Gosplan soon.”
“Where are you going?”
Petya nodded vaguely to his right. Sasha looked in that direction and saw thousands of glowing points, all different colors, burning all the way off to the horizon. Itakin could also have meant that he was planning to jump from the balcony.
“Like the stars in The Prince” Sasha said unexpectedly, gazing at the lights, “only they’re all upside down. Or downside up.”
“Maybe it’s in your Prince that they’re all upside down,” said Petya. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the picture there sometimes reverses?”
Sasha shook his head. As always, the view of the city in the evening induced a feeling of sadness in him. Long-forgotten memories would surface before being immediately forgotten again—most of all it seemed like an oath he had sworn to himself a thousand times and already broken 999 times.
“What’s the damn point of living anyway?” he asked.
“Well, now,” said Petya, “I haven’t done any drinking today, but anyway, why don’t you ask the guard? He’ll explain all about life to you.”
Sasha fixed his gaze on the lights again.
“You’ve been running through that labyrinth for more than a year now,” said Petya, “but have you ever wondered whether it’s really there or not?”
“What?”
“The labyrinth.”
“You mean, whether it really exists or not?”
“Yes.”
Sasha thought about it.
“I think it does. Or rather, it would be correct to say that it exists to the same extent that the Prince does. Because the labyrinth only exists for him.”
“To put it absolutely correctly,” said Petya, “both the labyrinth and the figure only exist for the person watching the screen.”
“Well, yes... I mean, why?”
“Because both the labyrinth and the figure can only appear in him. And the screen as well, come to that.”
“Well,” said Sasha, “we did that in second year.”
“But there’s one more detail,” Petya continued, paying no attention to Sasha’s words, “one very important detail. The dopes we did the course with forgot to mention it.”
“What detail?”
“You see,” said Petya, “if the figure has been working in State Supply for a long time, then for some reason it starts thinking that it is looking at the screen, although it is only running across it. And anyway, if a cartoon character could look at something, the first thing he would notice would be whoever was looking at him.”
“And who is looking at him?”
Petya thought for a moment.
“There is only one...”
The next instant something struck him hard in the back and he tumbled over the rail and hurtled down toward the ground. Sasha saw the thing like a boomerang that he had seen before on the stairs. It was spinning as it swung away in the direction of the chimneys on the horizon with their crown of motionless smoke. Sasha hadn’t even enough time to feel scared, it had all happened so quickly. Leaning over the edge of the balcony he saw Petya clinging tightly to the railings of the balcony one floor below.
“It’s all right,” shouted Petya, “the spinners never drop you more than one story. I’ll just...”
At this point Sasha spotted a huge eye like a round aquarium, overflowing with blue liquid, slowly creeping toward Petya along the wall.
“Petya! On your left!” he shouted.
Petya freed one hand and threw two small red spheres the size of a ball of wool at the blue eye—the first made the eye shudder to a halt, and when the second hit it, the eye dissolved into the air with a popping sound.
“Go back to room 620,” shouted Petya, clambering over the railings. “I’ll be there in a minute, and we’ll polish off your game.”
Sasha turned toward the balcony’s exit and suddenly a steel portcullis came rattling down right in front of him, its sharp spikes splitting several of the tiles on the floor. He stepped back, and a second portcullis clanged down onto the railing of the balcony. Looking up, Sasha saw a small square manhole in the low cement ceiling. He jumped in his accustomed fashion, pulled himself up and climbed into a narrow stone corridor.
Ahead of him a square patch of reddish light fell on the floor. Sasha walked up to it and looked cautiously upwards. There was a narrow four-sided shaft, and high above him he could see a burning torch and a section of smoke-blackened ceiling. It was obviously an ordinary corridor trap, but this time Sasha was at the bottom. There could be guards up above, so he stood on tip-toe, and stepping carefully over the dust that had accumulated over the centuries, he walked on.
Some way ahead he came to a turn and a few yards further on, a dead end. He was about to go back, but he heard a portcullis clank down at the far end of the corridor and he stopped. He’d fallen into a trap. There was only one thing left for him to do—carefully test all the slabs in the floor and th
e ceiling: any of them might control portcullises or sliding sections of the wall. Holding his hands above his head, he jumped. Then again. And again. The third slab gave slightly. After that it was simple: he jumped again, pushed against the slab with his hands and immediately sprang back. There was a rumbling sound and he squinted in the usual fashion to prevent the dust stirred up from the floor obstructing his vision.
After a little while he stepped forward. There was now a gaping rectangular hole in the ceiling, through which he could climb, and towering up above him was a wall with wooden cornices every two and a half yards—the distance was the same on all of the levels. Standing on one of those cornices he could jump up and catch hold of the next one, stand on it, and repeat the process, and so on all the way to the top. This wall had six cornices, so the entire process took a little over a minute, and he wasn’t even slightly tired. Now he was standing in a corridor between walls of crudely dressed stone blocks. Ahead of him there was a well shaft, with the bitter smell of torch smoke rising out of it.
Sasha looked down—about five yards below he could see a brightly lit floor. He sighed, lowered one leg over the edge of the hole, hung there on his hands, and then with a certain effort forced himself to open his fingers. The height was not very great, but the slab he landed on fell away under his feet and went tumbling downward. He didn’t have time to grab the edge of the hole and after an agonizingly long fall he crashed into the floor on top of the broken pieces of the shattered slab. He didn’t break anything, but he was stunned at the shock of the blow. For several seconds he squatted there on his haunches, remembering how long ago, one terrible dark winter in his childhood, he had bruised his coccyx badly jumping down from the dormer window of a gas substation onto a frozen mattress.
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 20
