SaveliI slammed the doors, took hold of the driving wheel, and swung round. When he was already halfway through the gates, he braked for one last time. He stuck his head out of the window.
“They’ll kill you, you cretins!”
“What the fuck can I do about that?” Artyom replied to the clouds of bluish smoke blowing into his face.
* * *
They closed the gates by hand. How long would they hold out when the assault started? Three minutes? Five?
“What did you stay for?”
“Oh, sure,” said Lyokha. “Just go driving off somewhere or other. Let’s get this fucking shit cleared up quick and then go home. Maybe we can still slip through.”
“I’ll go and look for something we can use …”
“Listen, Artyom. I’ve been beating my brains out: What do they want these jammers for anyway?”
“Ask the Reds that one. Maybe so they can tell everyone on the outside that they are the Metro? That they’re the ones in charge here? Maybe they’re preparing to attack Hansa … And getting help from someone on the outside. You saw the equipment they have, right? How could there be anything like that left in the Metro?”
And that four-by-four at Teatralnaya Station, he told himself. They were picking off the fascists. In their uniform protective suits. War, wasn’t it?
Right, then: He’d explained it to Lyokha, but not understood it himself. Why would anyone do that? Why would they keep forty thousand people—or however many it was—under the ground? What goal would justify doing that? he wondered.
“Go up on the roof. The machine gun’s still up there. Keep an eye on the road.”
He hobbled past the radio operator again.
“Where do you keep your grenades here?”
The weapons locker was standing there empty. They’d grabbed everything during the alarm. The little rooms: One had bunks in it; the other was the mess—you couldn’t hide anything there. Walking back past the control room, he glanced in. All the lights had gone out. Silence and dust hanging in the air.
It was a pity about one thing.
Svyatoslav Konstantinovich, you legless old fogey, you’ll listen to the airwaves when they all thaw out, but there won’t be anyone left for you to apologize to. If I could just get back to Moscow alive and sit down to listen to the radio with you. There you go, dad. In connection with our conversation. I’m totally schizo, of course, and I’m definitely an obsessive psychopath, and no way am I worthy of that little daughter of yours. But here you go, Svyatoslav Konstantinich, listen to this. Listen, listen. Don’t frown like that. Yes, that’s St. Petersburg. And this here is Paris. Uh-huh, that’s English. Right, then that’s Vladivostok. Impossible, eh? No it isn’t, because God knows when, but the Red Line set up jammers. Jammers, Svyatoslav Konstantinich. Oh yes! You probably know all about those, don’t you, unlike me? Eh? You know, but you missed this. We thought they’d broken all their teeth on the Order; we thought they were desperate to get that bunker. We got half our boys killed, just so they wouldn’t get their hands on that bunker. But maybe they weren’t interested in that old bunker of ours? Maybe they had bigger things in mind? Isn’t it just possible, Svyatoslav Konstantinich, that they were simply using it as a cover, distracting us, grinding us down in that siege, so we wouldn’t notice what was really important? Eh?”
He took the radio operator’s mask too, to replace his own one-eyed version, and went back outside. He walked round the building and came out facing the pylons. Firmly planted, with their roots in concrete, and held down on the ground by steel cables on all sides. No way to cut them down. No way to rock them and push them over. On the closest one he saw a ladder made of reinforcing bars, and he climbed up to see how much time was left.
You missed them, Svyatoslav Konstantinich. You missed the jammers; you missed the big trucks; you botched things with the war. You’re getting old, dad. You might not believe me, of course, because I’m obsessed, but you listen, listen to the radio. Listen and tell me this. What’s our Order’s mission now? To carry on peddling pig shit? Or to get people out onto the surface? To get our boys killed so the people here can all stay Morlocks? Or to help them get to a place where the radiation will be bearable? Where they can live! What good is all this to me? No good at all! I’m not going to be Moses after all, Svyatoslav Konstantinovich, and I really couldn’t give a damn. I was just trying to look good for this little whore. I won’t have time to be Moses for a while. I get demobilized in three weeks. Three weeks and I’ll be off—back to May, with the little orange ducks, to lick my ice cream. But you could have been Moses. And you still can be. It doesn’t say anywhere that no one with physical disabilities gets taken on for the Moses job.
Eh?
Right, then. Go to hell.
His shattered knee wouldn’t bend or straighten out. He had to scramble up to the sky the same way he scrambled out of that pitch-black hell: skipping lamely, hauling himself up.
He climbed until the grounds inside the concrete wall were the size of a pack of cigarettes. The wind up there was angry; it tried to blow Artyom off and carry him away. The pylons swayed, despite the steel hawsers. He saw a little doll-size Lyokha; he saw a little toy excavator; through a bald patch in the woods he saw the sandpit with the dead men and the little toy windmills.
To the west, in the direction of the city, his view of the highway was blocked by blank-eyed high-rise buildings. But to the east he had a clear view all the way to the horizon. There was no trace of SaveliI already: He was in a big hurry to get home. But Artyom did spot something else. Something like little beetles scrambling feebly along the road in the far distance. A pity the stalker had taken his sniper’s rifle with him. Could those be people?
As he was climbing down, he thought, But where were you before, people?
Why didn’t you ever reach us?
With the radio, it was probably like this: The Reds set up these pylons, well, so that no one in the Metro could contact any other cities. So okay, the radio’s dead. But if there were other places that were alive, inhabited, surely someone must have tried to get to Moscow? There weren’t any people from those other places in the Metro; Artyom hadn’t seen them, and neither had anyone else that he knew. So how come?
We didn’t know anything about you. They stopped our ears and blindfolded us and drove us underground. They told us that the place where you were born is the place where you belong. But didn’t you really give a blind damn about us?
He jumped down onto the dusty ground, leading with his sound leg, and shuffled off rapidly towards the guardhouse by the gates. Maybe he could find some grenades?
“Well, what?” Lyokha shouted to him.
“There’s someone on the road. Walking in from out of town! Keep your eyes peeled!
People from some other town out there, interesting … Or maybe a reconnaissance party, returning to the outpost. He’d find out soon. Very soon now.
He’d almost skipped and hopped all the way to the guardhouse when it suddenly struck him.
The excavator!
A huge brute like that must be able to topple the pylons. With its bucket … Or by towing. If only it was in working order …
He turned away from the guardhouse towards the corner. He hopped over to the monster across the wild grass and weeds crushed down by the caterpillar tracks—the orange paint was peeling off, the glass cabin was cracked, the arrow head of the bucket was resting on the earth wearily and dejectedly, like a drunk lying with his face in the mattress.
Was it working?
He scrambled up onto a caterpillar track and into the cabin. What did it look like?
Not like anything. There wasn’t any steering wheel. There were levers instead; one had a fancy knob on it—a fly in glass—and another had a metal skull. Ah no, there were pedals sticking out of the floor too, with buttons beside them. The ignition lock was taped over with something, but the wires were sticking out of it. Disconnected ends. Should he give it a try? Red to re
d, blue to blue.
Do you use this heap of junk or don’t you? Well?
He joined the bare ends together: Something awoke inside the brute; metal jerked convulsively and started trembling. There was a puff of black, sooty smoke. Artyom set his foot on a pedal uncertainly. He tried to move off, but the convulsion that had almost brought the machine to life passed off—and the machine faded out. Went quiet. Died.
Had Artyom done something wrong? He felt hot under the gas mask. It wasn’t me who broke it!
He looked at the cracked and split instrument gauges: The fuel gauge needle was licking at the zero in its thirst.
The end.
He could hear the wind towers again. Hammering at his ears—at his ears and his nerves.
The little windows in his gas mask misted over: Time was running out. He had no solution; he shouldn’t have stayed and he shouldn’t have allowed his apostle to stay. He walked round the excavator and found where to pour in the diesel. He shouted into it: Wooh!
Motherfucker.
Dragging his leg, he hopped over to the guardhouse: Maybe there was something in there. A grenade launcher?
No, of course not. No grenade launchers. There were two dead men. One in the doorway, crawling outside, another in a room, staring up at the ceiling. Neither of them happened to be carrying any explosive: no reason to. SaveliI was right.
There wasn’t a thing that Artyom could do to those pylons.
They had stood there before, they were still standing there, and they would carry on standing there. The trucks would come back; men without any insignia would shoot the two lost idiots and fling them to the dogs, who would blunt their teeth on lead; they’d replace the fuses, splice the torn wires together, and the aerials that could reach right to the other side of the world would start whispering again in chorus, that quiet whisper smothering any screams.
And everyone who was already used to life underground, to an empty globe, wouldn’t have to change their ways. They wouldn’t even have time to hear anything. Before they could even blink, the radio would be transmitting their favorite tuberculosis ward program. The world just flashed once and then went out again. They would be the sane ones again, and Artyom would be a psycho.
“Well, what?” Lyokha shouted from the roof.
“Nothing. Nothing so far,” Artyom answered.
So far.
It still wasn’t too late to leave, was it? Abandon this damned place, hide, and let the big trucks go hurtling past? Pretend to be a dried-out passenger in a rusty car, crawl along the long, long shoulder of the road to Moscow, and then somehow … Something. Another three weeks. Or two.
Back into the radio center, past the control room again, through the rooms again, banging the doors, kicking the cupboards and chairs. Where? Where was there anything anywhere in this place? How do I destroy you, you brutes? How do I annihilate you? The mute radio operator got under Artyom’s feet. He dragged him aside in a fury, and to spite him the man left a dirty track.
Back outside. Where hadn’t he looked? He ran round behind the building, raked through the bushes and combed through the grass. Then back into the blacked-out guardhouse. HI there, hI there. Since the television had fainted, it was showing a gray mirror-world, and everything in the mirror-world was the same, only even more crooked and more stupid. If there was any electricity, at least he could have observed the perimeter. If there was any electricity, he could …
He hobbled to the transformer building.
He swung the door wide open and propped it like that, so the creaking wind couldn’t slam it. I was in too much of a hurry, sorry. Maybe I can fix that here, eh? If there was electricity, I could … So clearly the only thing that can be done …
On all wavelengths …
You whisper on all wavelengths, right? Is that how you work, you bastards?
On all the wavelengths—on shortwave, and medium wave, and probably even on long wave—instead of music and call signs, you hiss, you blind. But if I can’t knock you down, maybe I can teach you to talk?
His fingers were clumsy in the thick rubber; the shadow didn’t belong to him—it wouldn’t let any light through; it stopped him from seeing. His lenses had steamed up, and now they were running with water. What had he broken here? He started tying together broken wires, clicking fuses back into place, trying to persuade them.
Nothing. There wasn’t any light. The wind towers were groaning, but there wasn’t any light.
“Lyokh! Lyokha!” He skipped outside. “Do you have any kind of clue about electricity?”
“Why?”
“Come down for a sec and take a look!”
It was two long minutes before he came in.
“Did you do that? You vandaw,” he mumbled through his crushed teeth.
“Do you have any idea?”
“Wew, some. I wanted to be an ewectwician. A wew-paid job. Only no one will fucking wet you work. They’ve got their own mafia.”
Artyom looked out and stuck his face in between the bars of the gates. There wasn’t anyone on the road: So those beetles hadn’t managed to crawl all the way here yet? had they missed the turning?
The first apostle was still fiddling with the distributor board. Shifting fuses about, mumbling something to himself under his breath. The little electric bulb under the ceiling dangled there, lifeless, its flask empty.
“Okay, d’you hear? Drop it. Forget it. It’s not your thing. Let’s go home.”
And Artyom looked bleakly at the dreary, gray wall assembled out of big concrete squares and realized there was no way home from here. Because the wall was so easy to climb over that it was a trap. It was easy to get inside, but you couldn’t get back out. He’d just keep on scurrying round the bait, spellbound, until the spring lashed out and broke his back.
“And what is my thing?” Lyokha asked. “Trading in shit at ten buwwets a bucket for the west of my life? Shove over, you’re bwocking my wight.”
“You’re a bastard,” Artyom told him. “I appointed you my apostle, and you abuse me.”
“Well, aren’t you funny! Come on, why don’t I take you on as my apostuw? You know, my mother pwophesied a gweat futuw for me,”
Lyokha snagged something with his fingernail and clicked it.
And there was light.
Artyom’s heart leapt. He grabbed hold of Lyokha and squeezed him as hard as he could.
“That’s it! You’re the savior here, not me. Go watch the road!”
He limped past the creaking into the radio center: A lightbulb was working in the buffer zone! He burst into the control room and straddled the chair on wheels. Teach me to understand gobbledygook! What was this here on the switches? He forced himself to breathe out, blinked his eyes clear, and went through the inscriptions systematically, from top to bottom and right to left. He found a switch: INT.GEN.USW, deciphered it as “interference generator” and moved it down. The others were SW, LW, and various different frequencies, scattered haphazardly across the makeshift console. He stuck the headphones on and clicked his way through the frequencies: Were they clear of hissing now?
He’d driven the snakes out of all the wavelengths, hadn’t he? It seemed like he had.
Now what?
The pylons were a metal forest growing outside the window, every one of them draped in wire lianas and tangling its own frequency up in them, sucking the living juice out of it. That was why there were so many of them here: To silence all the distant voices at once.
So can I replace them with my voice?
His fingers fumbled across the switches again like fingers. Engage broadcasting on USW-SW-MW …
Artyom touched the microphone on the headphones. He bent it towards his mouth: Listen to me. He traced where the wire dived down to with his fingers and found a switch with a little lamp on the console. He pressed it in and coughed into his own ears.
He coughed into the ears of the entire planet.
Artyom froze. He pulled off his gas mask: They had to hear him
clearly—all of them. Every word he said. He licked his cracked lips.
“This is Moscow. Do you hear me? St. Petersburg? Vladivostok? Voronezh? Novosibirsk? Do you hear me? This is Moscow! We’re alive! I don’t know if you heard us before … We couldn’t hear you. We thought we were the only ones left. We thought … There wasn’t anyone else. Nobody and nothing, do you understand? How could you understand? You’ve been chatting to each other all this time … While we … Oh Lord, thank God that you’re alive! That you’re there. Out there … Singing songs. How are you out there? We’ve been here all these years. Underground. We were afraid even to stick our heads out. We thought there was nowhere to go, can you believe that? We had no radio. There were no signals. Some bastards here set up jammers … In Moscow. In Balashikha. And they hid you from us. It was as if we were deaf. And blind. We sat here for twenty years … I’ve been here for twenty years, and I’m only twenty-six … Sitting here, down under the ground. My name’s Artyom. Down in the basement. In the Metro. Did you at least try to find us? I tried to find you … We tried. We thought the whole world had been burnt up, the whole planet … That there was nowhere to go, to crawl out to … But we still searched, we hoped. How are you? You have dances there … I want to come and see you so much. Can you breathe out there without a gas mask? What’s your air like? We don’t know anything about you. We’ve spent twenty years here alone. I don’t even know why. What for. Why did we sit here in the darkness? Surrounded by concrete? We’ll find out who did this to us. We’ll smash their fucking jammers. We’ll be together again. This is Moscow. We’ll be with you, with the whole world. We’re alive, do you understand? Everyone’s alive, and so are we! Maybe you have relatives here. Forty thousand people survived here. How many of you are there? We’ll be a country. We’ll live on the surface, like before. Like human beings. I … There was so much I wanted to say to you. I rehearsed what I was going to say a hundred times in my mind. And now I’ve forgotten it all. I hope you can hear me, at least. I’ll speak here for as long as I can. Then they’ll probably switch me off. The people who put up the jammers. Who cut us off from you. They’ll come back. We’ll try to hold out here for a while. But there are only two of us, and lots of them … The Reds. Just don’t think that you’re imagining this. Or that this is all a joke. I’m real. My name is Artyom. If they kill me, others in Moscow will hear and they’ll lead the rest of them out. Are you there, Moscow? Hansa? Polis? Everyone who hasn’t forgotten yet … Who else is listening? I’m not the only one. We’ve been tricked. We’ve all been tricked. We could have left our shelter a long time ago. And gone wherever we wanted. Driving or walking. Anywhere at all. Even as far as Paris. Or Ekaterinburg. The Reds hid everything from us. What for? So there wouldn’t be any hope? I don’t know what for. I can’t understand it. We can just … We can just live now. All go up on the surface—and live. Like before. Like human beings. The way people are supposed to live. Live! Do you hear me? There: I haven’t gone insane. They are there; they exist—all of Russia, and Europe, and America … They’re all real! Listen for yourselves! And now we exist too!”
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