Autoexec.bat—level 4
“Just where is it that I’m going?” Sasha thought, staring into the black mirror of the carriage door and adjusting the turban on his head. “I’ve already reached the seventh level—well, maybe not quite reached it, but I’ve seen what’s there. It’s the same old stuff, only the guards are fatter. So I’ll reach the eighth level—but it’s going to take so long. And what comes after that? Of course, there’s the princess.”
Sasha had last seen the princess two days before, between the third and fourth levels. The corridor on the screen had disappeared and been replaced by a room with a high vaulted ceiling, its floor spread with carpets. Immediately the music started playing, plaintive and wailing, but only at the beginning, and then only so that one note at the very end would sound particularly beautiful. He stopped thinking about the princess and began looking around at the people. Most of them were the filthy types that usually hung around railway stations. There were lots of drunks and identical-looking women carrying big bags. There was one Sasha particularly didn’t like the look of—wearing a red shawl and clutching two big bundles. “I’ve seen her before somewhere, for sure,” thought Sasha. He’d often had that feeling recently, the feeling that he’d already seen what was happening, only just where and in what circumstances he couldn’t recall. But he’d read in some journal that the feeling was called déjà vu, from which he had drawn the conclusion that the same thing happened to people in France. The columns of a station flickered past beyond the glass of the door. The train stopped. Sasha allowed himself to be caught up in the crowd and drifted slowly toward the escalators. Two of them were working. Sasha branched into the section of the crowd that was making for the one on the right. His head gradually filled with the slow, gloomy thoughts about life that usually came in the afternoon.
“It seems to me now,” he thought, “that nothing could be worse than what’s happening to me. But after another couple of levels I’ll start feeling nostalgic even about today. And it will seem to me that I had something in my grasp, without even knowing what it was, but I had it in my grasp and I threw it away. My God, how awful things must become afterwards, to make you start regretting what’s happening now. And the strangest thing of all is that life keeps on getting worse, more and more meaningless—but on the other hand, absolutely nothing in life changes. What have I got to hope for? And why do I get up every morning and go somewhere? I’m a bad engineer, a very bad one. I’m simply not interested in any of that. And I’m a poor chameleon as well, soon they’ll take me and throw me out, and they’ll be quite right too...”
A familiar clanking sound made Sasha turn cold. Looking up he saw that a body-scissors had been switched on on the next escalator. For the first moment the sense of fright was so strong that Sasha didn’t grasp that it was no threat to him. When he realized the situation he sighed so loudly that the woman with the bundles, the one who had attracted his attention in the train, looked over at him from the next escalator. She passed through the scissors without any idea of what would have happened if he had been in her place. Sasha found her gaze unpleasant and he turned away.
The next body-scissors stood at the exit from the subway and Sasha got through it without the slightest difficulty, but he didn’t drink from the small jar standing beyond it—it looked suspicious somehow, decorated with a strange triangle design. He had drunk from a jar like that once and then had had to take two weeks off work to get over it. Intuition told him that somewhere in the vicinity there must be another jar, and Sasha decided to look for it. His attention was caught by a hairdresser’s on the other side of the street: the first two letters in the shop sign were not lit and Sasha felt sure that must mean something.
Inside was a small room where clients waited their turn. It was quite empty now, which was the second strange thing. Sasha walked around the room, moved the armchairs about—late last year he had sat on a chair in the corridor at the army office, which he’d tumbled into from the third level, when suddenly a rope ladder had fallen down from above him and he’d made good his escape to a two month business trip. Then he jumped up and down a bit on the coffee table with the magazines (they sometimes controlled sections of the walls that swung open) and even tugged on the coat hooks. But it was all in vain. Then he decided to try the ceiling, climbed back up onto the coffee table and leapt upward, raising his hands above his head.
The ceiling proved to be solid and the table somewhat less so: two of its legs gave way at the same time and Sasha’s outstretched hands were thrust against a color photo of a smiling half-wit with red hair hanging on the wall. Suddenly a trap door creaked open in the floor, revealing the brass neck of a jar standing on the stone surface about two yards below.
Sasha leapt down onto the stone platform and the trap door slammed shut over his head. Looking around he saw at the other side of the corridor a pale warrior with a mustache wearing a plumed red turban. The warrior cast two diverging trembling shadows, because behind his back two smoky torches framed a tall carved door complete with a black sign which read “USSR GOSPLAN.”
“Well, well,” thought Sasha, snatching out his sword and dashing forward to meet the warrior, who had drawn a crooked yataghan, “and like a fool I always took the trolley.”
Level 5
“Itakin?” a female voice asked on the telephone. “He’s at lunch. But you can come up and wait. Is it you who was supposed to bring the new programs from State Supply?”
“Yes,” replied Sasha, “but I want to go to the cafeteria as well.”
“Do you remember the way up? Room 622, turn left along the corridor from the elevator.”
“I’ll find it,” said Sasha.
The cafeteria was noisy and crowded. Sasha walked between the tables, looking for his friend, but he couldn’t see him. Then he joined the line. In front of him there were two Darth Vaders from the first section: they breathed with a noisy whistling sound as they discussed some magazine article in their mechanical voices. It was very hard to understand anything at all from their unnatural speech. The first Darth Vader put two plates of sauerkraut on his tray, and the second took borscht and tea. Of course, the food in Gosplan wasn’t what it had been before the troubles began: all that remained of its former magnificence were the lovely five-pointed stars of carrot—cut with a special Japanese apparatus—which occasionally found their way into the cabbage.
Sasha was very curious about how the first Darth Vader would manage to eat his cabbage—he would definitely have to remove his hermetic black helmet for that. But the black-clad pair sat at a small table over in the corner and closed themselves off with a black curtain bearing the image of a sword and shield: all that could be seen beneath it were their gleaming calfskin boots, the pair on the left thrust motionless and firm against the floor, while the pair on the right were constantly swirling about, one boot rubbing against the other and wrapping its sock around the other’s calf. Sasha thought that if he happened to be playing Spy he would have recruited the Darth Vader on the right.
He looked around and carried his tray over to the farthest corner, where a dozen or so elderly men in flying uniforms were sitting at a table by the window. He sat politely at the edge of the group. They glanced at him, but didn’t say anything. One of the pilots, a stocky white-haired man with two unfamiliar medals on his light-blue flying suit, was standing holding a glass in his hand. He had just begun pronouncing a toast.
“Friends! We have the pleasure of marking a double celebration today. Today Kuzma Ulyanovich Staropopikov marks twenty years of service in Gosplan. And this very morning over Libya Kuzma Ulyanovich shot down his one-thousandth Mig.”
The pilots applauded and turned toward the hero of the hour, who was sitting at the center of the table. He was short, stout and bald, wearing thick glasses with frames held together with black tape. There was absolutely nothing distinctive about him—quite the contrary, he was the least remarkable of all the people gathered around the table, and Sasha had to look
closely before he saw the rows of medals and ribbons—equally unfamiliar—on his chest.
“I make so bold as to assert that Kuzma Ulyanovich is the finest pilot in Gosplan! And the ‘Purple Heart’ which he was recently awarded by Congress will be the fifth that he bears on his chest.”
People began applauding again, and Kuzma Ulyanovich was slapped on the shoulder several times. He turned a deep shade of red, waved his hand in the air, removed his glasses, and wiped them thoroughly with his handkerchief.
“And that’s not all,” continued the white haired man, “in addition to the F-15 and F-16, Kuzma Ulyanovich recently mastered a new fighter plane, the B-2 ‘Stealth’ fighter. His record also contains numerous technical improvements—after pondering the lessons of the conflict in Vietnam, he asked his mechanic to create two files in Assembler so that the cannon and the machine gun could be operated by a single key, and now we all use this method...”
“That’s enough now, surely,” the hero of the hour mumbled shyly.
Another pilot got to his feet—he also had a lot of medals on his chest, but not as many as Kuzma Ulyanovich. “Our Party organizer has just informed us that today Kuzma Ulyanovich shot down his thousandth Mig. In addition to that he has, for instance, destroyed the radar installation outside Tripoli 4,500 times and if we were to add in all the rocket ships and airports, his hit total would be quite staggering. But a man can’t be measured by numbers alone. I know Kuzma Ulyanovich well, perhaps better than the others here—I’ve been his flying partner for six months now—and I want to tell you about one of our raids. It was my first time on an F-15, and as you all know, it’s not an easy machine to handle: you only have to hurry a little bit too much, try turning just a little bit too fast, and it goes down. Before takeoff Kuzma Ulyanovich said to me: ‘Vasya, remember, don’t get nervous, fly behind and below and I’ll cover you.’ Well, I was inexperienced then, and full of pride—why should he be covering me, I thought, when I’ve been all around the Persian Gulf on an F-16? Yes, indeed... Well, we got into our cockpits, and we were given the command to take off. We were flying from the aircraft carrier America and our mission was first to sink some ship in the port at Beirut, and then wipe out a terrorist camp near Al-Benghazi. So we took off, and we’re flying low, on autopilot. Down there near Beirut there are maybe eight radar units—well, you know, you’ve all been there...”
“Eleven,” said someone at the table, “and there are always Mig-25s on patrol.”
“Right. Anyway, we got there flying low with our sighting devices switched off, and then with about ten miles left we went into manual, climbed a thousand feet and switched on the radar. They spotted us right away, naturally, but we’d already locked on, let go one Amraam each, taken evasive action against rockets, and set off westwards, losing altitude. The ship had been blasted to smithereens, they told us over the radio. So there we are again flying low and blind, and we seem to have made it without any problems, but then I spotted a Mig-23 and like an idiot I went after it—let me just stick a Sidewinder up his nozzle, I thought. Kuzma Ulyanovich could see on the radar that I’d moved to the right and he yelled at me over the radio: ‘Vasya, get back in line, fuck you!’ But I’d already switched on my sights, locked onto the bastard, and fired my rocket. What I should have done then was to fly back down toward the ground, but no way—I started watching the Mig falling. Then I looked at the radar and I saw an SA-2 coming straight for me, I’d no idea who launched it.”
“That’s the radar site near Al-Baidoi. When you’re flying west from Beirut you should never move to the right,” said the Party organizer.
“Sure, but I didn’t know that then. Kuzma Ulyanovich yelled over the radio: ‘Cut in the baffle!’ But instead of the thermal baffle—you have to press
Sasha drank his last mouthful of tea, got up, and went to the door. The flagstone just outside the door of the cafeteria looked a little strange—it was a different color and jutted up about half an inch above the others. Sasha stopped one step short of it, stuck his head out into the corridor and looked upwards. He was right: a yard above his head hung the gleaming steel spikes of a portcullis.
“Oh, no,” Sasha muttered.
He took a careful look around the cafeteria. At first glance the other exit was nowhere to be seen, but Sasha knew that it was never obvious. The way might lie, for instance, behind the huge picture on the wall, but he would have to swing from the chandelier in order to be able to jump into it, and that would require piling several tables on top of each other. There were also several projections on the wall which he might use to climb upwards, and Sasha had already made up his mind to try that when a woman in a white overall coat called out to him.
“You’re supposed to take your tray over to the washer, young man,” she said, “that’s no way to behave.” Sasha went back for his tray.
“...The entire section started searching for mistakes,” Kuzma Ulyanovich’s junior flying partner was saying. “Remember that? Then the late Eshagubin comes over and asks a question: ‘How,’ he says, ‘can an F-15 fly on a single motor?’ And you know what Kuzma Ulyanovich answered him?”
“That’s enough, now, really,” said Kuzma Ulyanovich, embarrassed.
“No, no, let me tell them...”
Sasha didn’t hear any more. His attention switched entirely to the moving conveyor belt that was carrying the plates and trays to the washer. It ended at a small opening, which he could easily climb through, and he decided to try it. Putting his tray on the conveyor, he looked around and then quickly clambered up himself. Two tank crew members standing by the belt glanced at him in amazement, but before they could say anything Sasha had squeezed through the opening, leapt over a gap in the floor, and set off as fast as his legs would carry him toward a slowly rising section of the wall with a large plaster shell covered in peeling paint. Beyond it, by the light of blazing torches, he could see a narrow staircase leading upward.
Level 6
Itakin’s boss, Boris Emelianovich, turned out to be one of the tank crew who had stared at Sasha with such astonishment in the cafeteria. Sasha ran into him right in the doorway of room 622, and since Sasha had just clambered up maybe a dozen cornices that you had to climb by jumping and then pulling yourself up, he was tired and panting, while Boris Emelianovich had come up in the elevator, so he was fresh and smelled of eau de cologne.
“Are you from Boris Grigorievich?” Boris Emelianovich asked, not showing the slightest sign that he recognized Sasha as the young hooligan from the cafeteria. “Let’s move, I have to leave in five minutes.”
Boris Emelianovich’s office was part of an immense hall sectioned off with cupboards like Boris Grigorievich’s office, but inside, occupying almost all of the space, stood a huge tank, an Abrams M-1, gleaming with lubricant. By the wall stood two barrels of fuel with a telephone and a four-megabyte Super AT with a VGA color monitor that made Sasha’s mouth water when he looked at it.
“A 386 processor?” he asked respectfully. “And that must he a 1.2 megabyte hard drive?”
“I don’t know all that,” Boris Emelianovich replied dryly, “ask Itakin, he’s my mechanic. What do you need me to sign?” Sasha stuck his hand into his bag and pulled out the papers, which had gotten slightly crumpled on the journey. Boris Emelianovich signed the first two right there on the armor plating with a flourish of his gleaming Mont Blanc pen shaped like a machine gun shell with a golden bullet tip, but he paused at the third and started to think.
“I can’t do this one,” he said at last, “I have to call the directorate. I shouldn’t sign this, Pavel Semyonovich Prokurin should.”
“Get me Pavel Semyonovich. When will he be there? No, I’ll call back.” He turned to Sasha and looked at him significantly.
“You’ve come at rather a bad time,” he said. “We’re advancing in five minutes. And if you want your paper signed, you’ll have to go to the directorate. Hang on though. It might be quicker. You can ride a bit of the way with me.” Boris Emelianovich leaned over the computer.
“Damn,” he said, “where’s Itakin gone? I can’t start the engine.”
“Try changing directory,” said Sasha, “you’re in the root directory. Or go into Norton first.”
“You try it,” answered Boris Emelianovich, moving aside.
Sasha jabbed at the keys in his accustomed manner: the hard drive whirred into action and almost immediately the tank’s electric transmission began humming powerfully and the air was filled with the bitter fumes of diesel exhaust. Boris Emelianovich leapt up agilely onto the armor plating; Sasha preferred to drag a chair up to the tank and step from that onto its slightly raised nose.
It was roomy and very comfortable in the turret. Sasha looked into the sight, but it wasn’t working yet; then he looked around. Inside, the turret looked liked the cabin of a bus which had been lovingly decorated by the driver—on both sides of the cannon’s breech hung key rings, pennants, and little monkeys, and the armor plating had been adorned with several girls in bathing suits cut out of a magazine. Boris Emelianovich threw Sasha a microphone helmet and disappeared into the driver’s compartment. The engine roared and the tank rolled out onto an immense plain, complete with a mountain that looked like a volcano far ahead in the distance, its summit cut off by the edge of the screen. Sasha rose waist-high out of the turret and looked around. He could see twenty or so similar tanks, two or three of which had appeared while he had been watching.
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 19