Wanderer turned back out onto the main highway. Boar delicately slapped him on the shoulder with the barrel of his pistol. “If you don’t mind, let me out here. Right over there, where the men are standing . . .”
The men were standing beside a newspaper kiosk, with their hands thrust deep into the pockets of their gray raincoats—about five of them—but apart from them there was nobody out on the sidewalks; the local residents had obviously been badly frightened by the depressive radiation strike and had all hidden away in various places.
“And what do you intend to do?” Wanderer asked, slowing down.
“Breathe a bit of fresh air,” Boar replied. “The weather’s really glorious today.”
“He’s one of ours,” Maxim told him. “You can say anything in front of him.”
The car halted at the roadside. The men in raincoats went behind the kiosk, and Maxim could see them peeping out from there.
“One of ours?” asked Boar. “Who are they, ours?”
At a loss, Maxim looked at Wanderer. Wanderer had no intention of trying to help him out.
“Anyway, OK,” said Boar. “I trust you. We’re going to deal with HQ now. I think HQ is the right place to start. There are people there—you know who I’m talking about—who need to be gotten out of the way, before they can put a halter on the movement.”
“Good thinking,” Wanderer suddenly growled. “And by the way, I think I recognize you. You are Tik Fesku, otherwise known as Wild Boar. Is that right?”
“Exactly right,” Boar politely said. Then he told Maxim, “And you deal with the Fathers. It’s a difficult job, but it’s just right for you. Where can I find you?”
“Wait, Boar,” said Maxim. “I almost forgot. In a few hours the whole country will collapse for days from radiation deprivation. Everybody will be absolutely helpless.”
“Everybody?” Boar doubtfully asked.
“Everybody except the degenerates. We need to make good use of that period of several days.”
Boar thought and raised his eyebrows. “Well now, that’s excellent,” he said. “If it’s true . . . As it happens, it’s degenerates that we’ll be dealing with. But I’ll bear it in mind. So where can I find you?”
Before Maxim could reply, Wanderer spoke for him. “At the same phone number,” he said. “And the same place. And I’ll tell you this. Set up your committee, since that’s how things have worked out. Reestablish the same organization that you had under the empire. Some of your people work for me in the institute . . . Massaraksh!” he suddenly hissed. “We have no time, and none of the people we need are close at hand . . . Damn you to hell, Mak!”
“The most important thing,” said Boar, setting his hand on Maxim’s shoulder, “is that there isn’t any more Center. Well done, Mak. Thank you . . .” He squeezed Maxim’s shoulder and awkwardly clambered out of the car, grappling with his artificial hand. Then suddenly his feelings broke through. “Lord,” he exclaimed, standing beside the car with his eyes closed, “is it really and truly gone? That’s . . . it’s . . .”
“Close the door,” said Wanderer. “Harder, harder . . .”
The car sped away. Maxim looked back. Boar was standing in the middle of the small group of men in gray raincoats and saying something, waving his good arm around. The men were standing there without moving. They still hadn’t understood what had happened. Or they didn’t believe it.
The street was empty. Armored personnel transports carrying guardsmen came trundling toward them along the edges of the sidewalks, and far up ahead, where the turn for the department was, trucks were already parked across the road and little figures in black were running across it. And suddenly a sickeningly familiar orange-yellow patrol vehicle with a long telescopic antenna appeared in the column of personnel transports.
“Massaraksh,” Maxim murmured. “I completely forgot about those gizmos!”
“You forgot about lots of things,” Wanderer growled. “You forgot about the mobile radiation emitters, you forgot about the Island Empire, you forgot about the economy . . . Are you aware that there is inflation in this country? Do you even have any idea what inflation is? Are you aware that famine is imminent, that the land is infertile? Are you aware that we have not had time to establish reserves of bread or reserves of medical supplies here yet? Do you know that in twenty percent of cases this radiation deprivation of yours leads to schizophrenia? Huh?”
He wiped his mighty forehead with the receding hair at the temples. “We need doctors . . . twelve thousand doctors. We need protein synthesizers. We need to decontaminate a hundred million hectares of polluted soil—just for a start. We need to halt the degeneration of the biosphere . . . Massaraksh, we need at least one earthman on the Islands, in that blackguard’s admiralty . . . Nobody can stay in place there—none of our men can even get back and tell us for certain what’s going on there . . .”
Maxim didn’t say anything. They reached the vehicles blocking the way through, and a dark-faced, stocky officer, waving his arm in a strangely familiar manner, walked up to them and demanded their documents in a croaking voice. Wanderer angrily and impatiently thrust a glittering ID card under his nose. The officer morosely saluted and glanced at Maxim. It was Mr. Cornet—no, now already Mr. Brigadier of Guards Chachu. His eyes opened wide. “Is this man with you, Your Excellency?” he asked.
“Yes. Order them to let me through immediately.”
“I beg your pardon, Your Excellency, but this man—”
“Let me through immediately,” Wanderer barked.
Brigadier Chachu sullenly saluted, swung around, and waved to the soldiers. One of the trucks moved aside and Wanderer hurled the car into the gap that opened up.
“That’s the way it is,” he said. “They’re ready; they were always ready. And you thought it was all Abracadabra and it’s done. Shoot Wanderer, hang the Fathers, disband the cowards and fascists at your HQ, and the revolution will be over.”
“I never thought that,” said Maxim. He was feeling very miserable, crushed, helpless, and hopelessly stupid.
Wanderer squinted at him and gave a crooked grin. “Well, all right, all right,” he said. “I’m just angry. Not with you—with myself. I answer for everything that happens here, and it’s my fault that things have turned out this way. I simply couldn’t keep up with you.” He grinned again. “You guys in the FSG are quick on your feet.”
“No,” said Maxim, “don’t torment yourself like that. I’m not tormenting myself—I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Call me Rudolf.”
“Yes . . . I’m not tormenting myself, Rudolf. And I don’t intend to. I intend to work. And make a revolution.”
“You’d better intend to go home,” said Wanderer.
“I am home,” Maxim impatiently said. “Let’s not talk about that any more . . . I’m interested in the mobile radiation emitters. What can be done about them?”
“Nothing has to be done about them,” Wanderer replied. “You’d do better to think about what can be done about inflation.”
“I’m asking about the radiation emitters,” said Maxim.
Wanderer sighed. “They work on batteries,” he said. “And they can only be recharged at my institute. In three days’ time they’ll croak . . . But in a month’s time an invasion is due to begin. Usually we manage to throw the submarines off course so that only a few of them reach the coast. But this time they’re assembling an armada . . . I was counting on the depressive radiation, but now we’ll simply have to sink them . . .” He paused for a moment. “So you’re at home, are you? Well, let’s suppose you are . . . Then what precisely do you intend to do now?”
They were already approaching the department. The heavy gates were tightly closed, and there were black gun ports that Maxim had never seen before in the stone wall. The department had become like a fortress, ready for battle. But three men were standing in front of the pavilion, and Zef’s ginger beard blazed as brightly as an exotic flower among the green
ery.
“I don’t know,” said Maxim. “I’m going to do what well-informed people tell me to do. If I have to, I’ll deal with inflation. If I have to, I’ll sink submarines . . . But I know my most important task now: as long as I’m alive, nobody will ever be able to build another Center. Not even with the very best intentions in the world.”
Wanderer didn’t say anything to that. The gates were very close now. Zef scrambled through the hedge and walked out into the road. His automatic rifle was hanging behind his shoulder, and it was obvious from a distance that he was angry, and now he would start cursing and demanding explanations for why, massaraksh, they had dragged him away from his work, filled his head with all sorts of nonsense about Wanderer, and left him hanging around here among the flowers for more than an hour like a little kid.
Afterword
BY BORIS STRUGATSKY
It is known with absolute certainty when this novel was conceived—on June 12, 1967, the following entry appeared in our work journal: “We need to compose a proposal for an optimistic story about [first] contact.” And immediately thereafter:
We have composed the proposal. The story The Inhabited Island. The plot: Ivanov crash-lands. The situation. Capitalism. Oligarchy. Control via psychowaves. Sciences only utilitarian. No progress. The machine is controlled by votaries. A means of ideal propaganda has just been discovered. Unstable equilibrium. Infighting in the government. The people are pulled from one side to the other, depending on who can reach the button. The psychology of tyranny: What does a tyrant want? It’s not push-button power; what’s wanted is sincerity, great deeds. There is a percentage of the population on whom the rays have no effect. Some of them eagerly strive to join the oligarchs (the oligarchs are also not susceptible). Some of them flee to the underground to avoid elimination as recalcitrant material. Some of them are revolutionaries like the Decembrists and the Narodnik populists. Following trials and tribulations Ivanov finds himself in the underground.
It is curious that this emphatically cheerful entry is situated precisely between two profoundly somber ones—06/12/67: “B. has arrived in Moscow in connection with the rejection of TоТ by Detgiz”; and 06/13/67: “Offensive snub at Young Guard with TоТ.”1 This double blow stunned us, uncoupling us from reality for a while. We were left, so to speak, in a state of “artistic punch-drunkenness.”
I remember very clearly how, discouraged and angry, we said to each other, “Ah, you don’t want satire? You don’t need Saltykov-Shchedrins any longer? Contemporary problems no longer perturb you? Aaall right! You’ll get an empty-headed, harebrained, absolutely toothless, entertaining novel about the adventures of spunky kid, a twenty-second-century Young Communist . . .” We humorous lads seemingly intended to punish someone among the holders of power for rejecting the serious themes and problems we were offering. Punish Comrade Farfurkis with a frivolous novel! Laughable. It is laughable and a little embarrassing to remember it now. But at that time, in the summer and autumn of 1967, when all the editorial offices who were friendliest to us had, one after another, rejected Tale of the Troika and Ugly Swans, we failed to see anything amusing in what was happening.
We set about The Inhabited Island without enthusiasm, but very soon the work enthralled us. It turned to be a damned thrilling occupation—writing a toothless, strictly entertaining novel! Especially since quite soon it stopped seeming so very toothless to us. The radiation towers, and the degenerates, and the Battle Guards—everything fell into place like cartridges slipping into the magazine, everything found its prototype in our adorable reality, everything proved to be a vehicle for a subtext. Moreover, it happened quite regardless of our will, seemingly of its own accord, like the multicolored candy crumbs in some magical kaleidoscope that transforms chaos and a random mishmash into an elegant, coherent, and entirely symmetrical little picture.
It was splendid, inventing a new, fantastic world—and it was even more splendid endowing it with highly familiar attributes and various realia. I’m looking through the work journal at the moment: November 1967, the Komarovo Writers’ House, we only worked during the day, but how we worked: seven, ten, eleven(!) pages a day. Not fair copy, of course, but draft text, created and extracted out of nothing, out of oblivion! At that rate we finished the draft in only two passes, 296 pages in thirty-two working days. The clean copy was written even faster, twelve to sixteen pages a day, and in May the completed manuscript was taken off to Detgiz in Moscow and, almost simultaneously, to the Leningrad journal Neva.
Thus the novel (an unprecedentedly thick Strugatsky novel for that time) was written in a period of six months. Its entire subsequent history is an agonizing story of polishing, smoothing out, ideologically deburring, adapting, and adjusting the text to conform to the various and often absolutely unpredictable demands of the Great and Mighty Censoring Machine.
“What is a telegraph pole? It’s a well-edited pine tree.” They failed to reduce The Inhabited Island to the condition of a pole—in fact the pine tree remained a pine tree, despite all the ingenious efforts of the delimbers in plainclothes—but nonetheless a more than ample hash was made of things, with even more authorial blood set boiling and authorial nerves frayed. And this grueling struggle for definitive and irreproachable ideological decontamination went on for very nearly a year.
Two factors played an absolutely essential role in this battle. First, we (and the novel) were damn lucky with our editors—both at Detgiz and at Neva. At Detgiz the novel was handled by Nina Matveevna Berkova, an old friend and defender of ours, a highly experienced editor who had been through hell and high water, who knew the theory and practice of Soviet literature from A to Z, who never gave way to despair, who knew how to retreat and was always ready to advance. And in Neva we were overseen by Samuil Aronovich Lurie, a supremely subtle stylist and natural-born literary scholar, as intelligent and vitriolic as the devil, a connoisseur of the psychology of Soviet ideological bosses in general and the psychology of A. F. Popov, the editor-in-chief of Neva at the time, in particular. If not for the efforts of these friends who were our editors, the fate of the novel could have been different—it would either not have appeared at all or would have been so badly mutilated as to be unrecognizable.
Second, the general political context of that time. It was 1968, “the year of Czechoslovakia,” when the Czech Gorbachevs were desperately attempting to prove to the Soviet monsters that “socialism with a human face” was possible and even inevitable. At times it seemed that they were pulling it off, that at any moment the Stalinists would retreat and give way. No one knew what would happen in a month’s time—whether freedom would triumph, as in Prague, or whether everything would finally come full circle, back to remorseless ideological glaciation, perhaps even to the total triumph of the proponents of the GULAG.
With one accord the liberal intelligentsia expressed their opposition, all eagerly trying to convince each other (in their kitchens) that Dubček was certain to win, because it was impossible to strike down the ideological rebellion by force—that would be against the mood of the times, this wasn’t Hungary in 1956, and all these Brezhnev-Suslovs were too spineless, they didn’t have the good old Stalinist tempering, they didn’t have enough fire in their bellies, and the army these days wasn’t what it used to be. “Yes it is, our army’s still what it used to be,” the cleverest of us objected. “And their bellies have enough fire in them, don’t you worry. You can be sure the Brezhnev-Suslovs won’t flinch, and they’ll never give way to any Dubčeks, because it’s a matter of the Brezhnevs’ own survival.”
And there was deadly silence from those few individuals who generally could not be directly contacted, who already knew in May that the matter had been decided. And, of course, nothing was said by those who didn’t know anything for certain but sensed it, sensed it with their very skin: everything will be as it should be, everything will be the way it’s supposed to be, everything will be the way it always has been—the midlevel bosses, naturally including th
e junior officers of the ideological army, and the editors-in-chief of journals, the handlers of the Party’s regional committees and city committees, the staff of Glavlit2 . . .
The scales were wavering in the balance. No one wanted to make the final decisions; everyone was waiting to see which way the drawbar of history would turn. Those in positions of responsibility tried not to read any manuscripts at all, and when they did, they put forward mind-boggling demands to authors, and when those had been taken into account, they put forward others, even more mind-boggling.
In Neva they demanded that we: shorten it; take out words such as “homeland,” “patriot” and “fatherland”; it wasn’t permissible for Mak to have forgotten what Hitler was called; clarify the role of Wanderer; emphasize the presence of social inequality in the Land of the Fathers; replace the Galactic Security Commission with a different term, with different initials3 . . .
At Detgiz (to begin with) they demanded that we: shorten it; take out the naturalism in the description of war; clarify the role of Wanderer; obfuscate the social order of the Land of the Fathers; emphatically exclude the very concept of “Guards” (replace it, say, with “Legion”); emphatically alter the very concept of “Unknown Fathers”; remove terms such as “social democrats,” “communists,” etc.
However, as Vladimir Vysotsky sang in those years, “but that was just for starters.” The full implications were waiting for us up ahead.
In early 1969 the serial version of the novel appeared in Neva. Despite the general toughening up of the ideological climate as a consequence of the Czechoslovak “disgrace,” despite the sacred horror that had seized the obsequiously and fearfully trembling ideological bosses, despite the fact that at that precise moment several articles berating the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction had all simultaneously drawn to a head and burst—despite all of this, we managed to publish the novel, and with only limited, in effect minimal, losses. This was a success. Indeed, you could say it was a victory that had seemed unlikely and that no one had expected.
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