The Inhabited Island Read online

  Copyright © 1969, 1971 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

  Afterword copyright © 2001 by Boris Strugatsky

  English language translation copyright © 2020 by Andrew Bromfield

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, IL 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61373-600-5

  Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Is available from the Library of Congress.

  Cover photo and design: Jonathan Hahn

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  Contents

  PART I: Robinson Crusoe

  PART II: The Guardsman

  PART III: The Terrorist

  PART IV The Convict

  PART V: The Earthman

  Afterword by Boris Strugatsky

  THE INHABITED ISLAND

  1

  Maxim opened the hatch a little way, stuck his head out, and apprehensively glanced at the sky. The sky was low and solid-looking, without that frivolous transparency that hints at the unfathomable depth of the cosmos and a multitude of inhabited worlds; it was a genuine biblical firmament, smooth and impervious. And this firmament, which no doubt rested on the mighty shoulders of some local Atlas, was lit by an even phosphorescent glow. Maxim searched at its zenith for the hole punched through it by his ship, but there wasn’t any hole, only two large black blots, spreading out like drops of ink in water. Maxim swung the hatch all the way open and jumped down into the tall, dry grass.

  The air was hot and thick, with a smell of dust, old iron, crushed vegetation, and life. There was also a smell of death, ancient and incomprehensible. The grass came up to his waist, and there were dark thickets of bushes close by, with dismal, crooked trees haphazardly jutting up out of them. It was almost light, like a bright, moonlit night on Earth, only without any moonlight shadows and without any of that bluish moonlight haze; everything was gray, dusty, and flat. His ship was standing at the bottom of an immense depression with gently sloping sides. The terrain around the ship rose noticeably toward an indistinct horizon. And this was strange, because nearby a river, a large, calm river, flowed to the west, uphill across the slope of the depression.

  Maxim walked around the ship, running his hand over its cold, slightly damp flank. He found traces of impacts where he was expecting them. A deep, nasty-looking dent below the indicator ring—that was when the ship suddenly jerked and flipped over onto its side and the cyberpilot took offense, so that Maxim had to hastily override the controls. And there was a notch beside the right visual sensor iris—that was ten seconds later, when the ship was set on its nose and went blind in one eye. Maxim looked up at the zenith of the sky again. The black blots were barely even visible now. A meteorite strike in the stratosphere; probability zero point zero zero . . . But every possible event occurred at some time or other, didn’t it?

  Maxim stuck his head back into the cabin, set the controls to self-repair, activated the express laboratory, and walked toward the river. This is an adventure, of course, but it’s still just routine. Boring. For us in the FSG, even adventures are routine. A meteorite strike, a radiation strike, an accident on landing. An accident on landing, a meteorite strike, a radiation strike . . . Adventures of the body.

  The tall, brittle grass rustled and crunched under his feet, and the prickly seeds clung to his shorts. A cloud of some kind of midges flew at him, whining and droning, jostled about right in front of his face, and then left him alone. Serious, grown-up people don’t join the Free Search Group. They have their own serious, grown-up business to deal with, and they know that all these alien planets are essentially tiresome and humdrum. Tiresomely humdrum. Humdrumly tiresome. But, of course, if you’re twenty years old, if you don’t really know how to do anything much, if you don’t really know what you would like to do, if you still haven’t learned to appreciate the most important thing that you possess—time—and if you don’t have any special talents or the prospect of acquiring any, if the impulse that dominates your entire being at the age of twenty still emanates, as it did ten years ago, not from your head but from your hands and feet, if you are still primitive enough to imagine that on unknown planets you can discover some precious object or other that is quite impossible on Earth, if, if, if . . . Well then, of course—take the catalog, open it at any page, jab your finger at any line, and go flying off. Discover a planet, give it your own name, and determine its physical characteristics; do battle with monsters, if any such should be found there; establish contact, should there be anyone with whom to do so; or play Robinson Crusoe for a while, should you not discover anyone . . .

  And it’s not as if all this is pointless. They’ll thank you and tell you that you have contributed to the best of your ability, and they’ll summon you for a detailed discussion with an eminent specialist . . . Schoolchildren, especially the backward ones, and definitely those in the youngest classes, will regard you with respect, but when you meet your Teacher, he will merely inquire, So you’re still in the FSG, then? He’ll change the subject, and his expression will be guilty and sad, because he blames himself for the fact that you’re still in the FSG, and your father will say, Hmm . . . and hesitantly offer you a job as a lab technician, and your mother will say, Maxie, but you used to draw really well as a child, and Oleg will say, How much longer? Stop disgracing yourself like this, and Jenny will say, Let me introduce you to my husband. And they’ll be right, everyone will be right, apart from you. And you’ll go back to the FSG central office and there, trying hard not to look at the other two blockheads just like you who are rummaging through the catalogs on the next set of shelves, you’ll take down yet another volume, open it at random to any page, and jab your finger at it . . .

  Before walking down the ridge to the river, Maxim looked around. Behind him the grass he had trampled down was straightening out, raggedly jutting back up, the crooked trees were black silhouettes against the background of the sky, and the open hatch was a bright little circle. Everything was very normal. Well, OK, he said to himself. So be it . . . It would be good to find a civilization—powerful, ancient, and wise. And human . . . He went down to the water.

  The river really was large and slow, and to the naked eye it clearly appeared to flow down from the east and up toward the west (however, the refraction here was horrendous). It was also obvious that the opposite bank was shallow and overgrown with thick rushes, and a half mile upstream Maxim could see some kinds of columns and crooked beams jutting up out of the water and a twisted latticework of girders, entangled in shaggy, creeping plants. Civilization, Maxim thought without any particular enthusiasm. He could sense a lot of iron on all sides, and something else as well, something very unpleasant and asphyxiating; when he scooped up a handful of water, he realized that it was radiation, rather strong and pernicious. The river was carrying along radioactive substances from the east, and that made it clear to Maxim that there was little to be gained from this civilization, that once again this was not what was required. It would be best not to establish contact; he should just carry out the standard analyses, unobtrusively fly around the planet a couple of times, and clear out of here. And then, back on Earth, he would hand over his materials to the morose, worldly-wise gentlemen of the Galactic Security Council, and forget about all of this as quickly as possible.

  He fastidiously shook his fingers and wiped them on the sand, then squatted down and started pondering. He tried to picture
the inhabitants of this planet, which could hardly be thriving and trouble-free. Somewhere beyond the forests was a city, also unlikely to be thriving: dirty factories, decrepit reactors dumping radioactive gunk in the river; ugly, barbaric buildings with sheet-iron roofs, large expanses of wall, and not many windows; dirty gaps between the buildings, piled high with refuse and the corpses of domestic pets; a large moat around the city, with drawbridges over it . . . but, no, that was before reactors. And the people: he tried to picture the people, but he couldn’t. He only knew that they were wearing a lot of clothes, that they were densely packed into thick, coarse material and had high, white collars that rubbed their chins sore . . . Then he saw the tracks in the sand.

  They were the tracks of bare feet. Someone had come down off the ridge and walked into the water. Someone with large, broad feet, someone heavy, pigeon-toed and clumsy—definitely humanoid, but with six toes on each foot. Grunting and groaning, he had scrambled down the ridge, hobbled across the sand, plunged into the radioactive water with a splash, and swum, wheezing and snorting, to the opposite bank, into the rushes. All without removing his high, white collar.

  Everything on all sides was suddenly lit up by a bright blue flash, like a lightning strike, instantly followed by rumbling, hissing, and crackling above the ridge. Maxim jumped to his feet. Dry earth came pouring down the ridge, and something shot up into the sky with a threatening screech, fell into the middle of the river, and sent up a fountain of spray mingled with white steam. Maxim started swiftly running up the slope. He already knew what had happened, he just didn’t understand why, and he wasn’t surprised when, at the spot where his ship had just been standing, he saw a swirling column of incandescent smoke, a gigantic corkscrew ascending into the phosphorescent vault of the heavens. The ship had burst, and its ceramite shell was flickering with a purple glow; the dry grass around it was merrily burning, the bushes were blazing, and smoky little flames were catching hold of the gnarled trees. The furious heat struck Maxim in the face, and he shielded himself with his open hand, backing away along the ridge—first one step, then another, then another, and another . . . He inched backward, keeping his watering eyes fixed on the magnificent beauty of this incandescent torch, this sudden volcano, scattering its crimson and green sparks, and the senseless frenzy of the rampaging energy.

  No, it’s obvious why, he thought in dismay. A big monkey showed up, saw I wasn’t there, climbed inside, and raised the deck. I don’t even know how to do that, but the monkey figured it out—it was a very quick-witted monkey, with six toes. Anyway, it raised the deck . . . What do we have in there, under the deck in our ships? Anyway, it found the batteries, took a big rock—and wham! A very big rock, weighing about three tons, and it took a swing . . . An absolutely massive, mega-huge kind of monkey . . . And it made a total wreck of my ship with its cobblestone—two hits up there in the stratosphere already, and now one down here too . . . An incredible story; I don’t think anything like that has ever happened before. But what am I supposed to do now? They’ll miss me soon enough, of course, but even when they do miss me, they’re not very likely to believe that such a thing is possible—the ship has been destroyed but the pilot is still in one piece. What’s going to happen now? My mother . . . My father . . . My Teacher . . .

  He turned his back to the conflagration and walked away, moving quickly along the river. Everything around him was illuminated by red light, and his shadow on the grass in front of him kept shortening and lengthening by turns. On his right a sparse forest began, smelling of decaying leaves, and the grass turned soft and damp. Two large nocturnal birds cacophonously shot up from right under his feet and fluttered away, low above the water, toward the far bank. He fleetingly thought that the fire might overtake him and then he would have to escape by swimming, and that would be really obnoxious. Then the red light on all sides faded and went out completely, and he realized that, unlike him, the fire-fighting devices had finally figured out what had happened and performed their designated function with their usual dependable thoroughness. He vividly pictured to himself the smoke-blackened, half-melted cylinders, absurdly jutting up amid the blazing debris, belching out dense clouds of pyrophage and feeling very pleased with themselves.

  Calmly now, he thought. The important thing is not to do anything rash. There’s plenty of time. In fact, I’ve got heaps and heaps of time. They can search for me for all eternity; the ship’s gone and it’s impossible to find me. And until they understand what happened, until they’re absolutely certain, they won’t tell my mother anything. And I’ll come up with something or other here.

  He passed by a small, cool swamp, scrambled through some bushes, and came out onto a road, an old, cracked concrete road that ran off into the forest. Stepping over the concrete slabs, he walked to the edge of the ridge and saw the rusty girders, overgrown with creepers—the remains of some large latticework structure, half immersed in the water. And on the far bank he saw the continuation of the road, barely distinguishable under the glowing sky. Apparently there had once been a bridge here. And apparently someone had found this bridge a nuisance and had knocked it down into the river, which had not rendered it either more beautiful or more convenient. Maxim sat down on the edge of the ridge and dangled his legs. He carefully scrutinized his inner condition, reassured himself that he wasn’t doing anything rash, and started thinking.

  I’ve found the main thing I need. There’s a road right here. A bad road, a crude road, and, what’s more, an old road, but nonetheless a road, and on all inhabited planets roads lead to those who built them. What else do I need? I don’t need food. That is, I could eat a bit, but that’s just my primeval instincts at work, and we’ll suppress them for now. I won’t need water for at least a day and a night. There’s plenty of air, although I’d prefer it if the atmosphere contained less carbon dioxide and radioactive filth. So I don’t have any basic physical needs to appease. But I do need a small—in fact, to be honest, a quite primitive little—null-transmitter with a spiral circuit. What could be simpler than a primitive null-transmitter? Only a primitive null-battery. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the circuit of a transmitter based on positron emitters immediately surfaced out of his memory. If he had the components, he could assemble the little doodad in a jiffy, without even opening his eyes. He mentally ran through the assembly process several times, but when he opened his eyes, there was still no transmitter. There wasn’t anything.

  Robinson Crusoe, he thought with a strange feeling of curiosity. Maxim Crusoe, that is. Well, well—I don’t have a thing. Just shorts with no pockets and a pair of sneakers. But I do have an island, an inhabited one. And since the island is inhabited, there’s always hope that I might find a primitive null-transmitter. He earnestly attempted to think about a null-transmitter but didn’t manage it very well. He kept seeing his mother all the time, as she was being informed, “Your son has disappeared without a trace,” and the expression on her face, and his father rubbing his cheeks and confusedly looking around, and how cold and empty they felt . . . No, he told himself. Thinking about that isn’t allowed. Anything else at all but not that, otherwise I’ll never get anything done. I command and forbid. Command myself not to think about it and forbid myself to think about it. No more. He got up and set off along the road.

  The forest, initially timid and sparse, gradually grew bolder, advancing closer and closer to the road. Several small, impudent young trees had already smashed through the concrete and were growing right there in the roadway. The road was obviously several decades old, or at least it had been several decades since it was used. The forest at the sides rose higher and higher, growing thicker and thicker, and in places the branches intertwined above Maxim’s head. It got dark, and loud, guttural whoops started ringing out in the thickets, now on the left, now on the right. Something in there was stirring about, rustling and trampling. At one point something squat and dark, hunched down low, ran across the road about twenty steps ahead of him. Gnats droned.


  It suddenly occurred to Maxim that this area was so neglected and wild, there might not be any people nearby, and it might take him several days and nights to reach them. Maxim’s primeval instincts were roused once again, but he could sense that he was surrounded by plenty of live meat here and he wouldn’t starve to death, that it probably wouldn’t all taste great but it would be interesting to do a bit of hunting anyway. And since he was forbidden to think about the really important things, he started remembering how he and Oleg used to go hunting with the park ranger Adolph, with just their bare hands, cunning against cunning, reason against instinct, strength against strength, three days and nights at a stretch, chasing a deer through tangled, fallen trees, catching it, grabbing it by the horns, and tumbling it over onto the ground . . . Maybe there weren’t any deer here, but there was no reason to doubt that the local game was edible; the moment he started pondering and got distracted, the gnats started ferociously devouring him, and everyone knew that you wouldn’t starve to death on an alien planet if you yourself were edible there.

  It would be fun to lose my way here and spend a year or two roaming through the forest. I could acquire a companion—some kind of wolf or bear—and we’d go hunting together and talk . . . only I’d get bored eventually, of course. And then, it doesn’t look like I could get any pleasure out of wandering through these woods; there’s too much iron everywhere, there’s nothing to breathe . . . And anyway, first of all I have to assemble a null-transmitter . . .

  Maxim stopped and listened. He could hear a hollow, monotonous booming from somewhere deep in the forest thickets, and he realized that he had been hearing this booming for a long time already but had only just noticed it. It wasn’t an animal and it wasn’t a waterfall—it was a mechanism, some kind of barbaric machine. It was snorting, bellowing, grating metal on metal, and scattering hideous, rusty smells. And it was getting closer.