The Inhabited Island Read online

  He glanced out the window again and opened his mouth in bewilderment. Two men were walking along the street toward the garrison HQ. One of them was familiar: that ginger roughneck Zef, one of the especially dangerous educatees, the master sergeant of the 134th Sappers’ Unit, a condemned man who earned his life by keeping the roads clear. But the other man—well, he was some kind of bogeyman, and a creepy kind of bogeyman at that. At first Gai took him for a degenerate, but then he realized that Zef wouldn’t be likely to drag a degenerate into garrison HQ. He was a really husky young guy, brown all over, as strong as an ox, and naked: all he had on was a short pair of some kind of underpants made out of some shiny material. Zef had his gun with him, but it didn’t look like he was escorting this stranger; they were walking side by side, and the stranger kept trying to make Zef understand something, extravagantly waving his arms around all the time. But Zef was just letting him rattle on, and he had a totally bemused look on his face. He’s some kind of savage, thought Gai. Only what was he doing out there on the highway? Maybe he was raised by bears? There have been cases like that. And he fits the part all right—just look at those muscles and the way they ripple.

  He watched as the two men walked up to the sentry, and Zef, wiping away his sweat, started trying to explain something. But the sentry was a rookie; he didn’t know Zef, and he prodded him under the ribs with his automatic, obviously telling him to move back to the regulation distance. Seeing this, the naked young guy got involved in the conversation. His hands flew backward and forward through the air, and his face was really strange now; Gai couldn’t understand his expression at all. It was like mercury, and the man’s eyes were dark, and they were shifting about rapidly . . . That was it—now the sentry was totally confused too. Now he would raise the alarm. Gai turned around.

  “Mr. Cornet,” he said, “permission to speak? The sergeant of the 134th Unit has brought someone in. Will you take a look?”

  The cornet walked over to the window, took a look, and his eyebrows shot up. He pushed the window frame open, stuck his head out, and shouted, choking on the dust that came pouring in. “Sentry! Let them pass!”

  Gai was just closing the window when there was a tramping of feet in the corridor and Zef edged into the office with his bizarre companion in tow. Tumbling in behind them, and jostling them on, came the officer of the guard and another two guys from the duty watch. Zef stood at attention, cleared his throat, fixed the cornet with his brazen blue eyes, and wheezed, “Master sergeant of the 134th Unit, educatee Zef, begs leave to report. This man here was detained on the highway. All the signs indicate that he is insane, Mr. Cornet: he eats poisonous mushrooms, doesn’t understand a word that is spoken to him, speaks in an incomprehensible fashion, and goes around, as you might be pleased to observe, naked.”

  While Zef was reporting, the detainee ran his agile eyes around the room, smiling at everyone there in a strange, sinister manner—his teeth were even and as white as sugar. The cornet clasped his hands behind his back, moved closer, and looked the man over from head to foot. “Who are you?” he asked.

  The detainee smiled in an even more sinister manner, slapped his open hand on his chest and uttered something unintelligible; it sounded like “mah-sim.” The officer of the guard guffawed, the sentries started giggling, and the cornet smiled too. Gai didn’t immediately get the joke but then he remembered that in thieves’ slang “mah-sim” meant “knife-eater.”

  “Apparently he is one of your company,” the cornet remarked to Zef.

  Zef shook his head, scattering a cloud of dust out of his beard. “Absolutely not,” he said. “‘Mah-sim’ is what he calls himself, but he doesn’t understand thieves’ argot at all. So he isn’t one of ours.”

  “A degenerate, probably,” the officer of the guard suggested, and the cornet gave him an icy look. “Naked,” the officer of the guard ardently explained, backing away toward the door. “Permission to carry on, Mr. Cornet?” he barked.

  “Go,” said the cornet. “And send someone to get the headquarters medical officer, Mr. Zogu. Where did you catch him?” he asked Zef.

  Zef reported that the previous night he and his unit had been combing quadrant 23/07. They had destroyed four self-propelled devices and one automated device, purpose unknown, losing two men in the explosion, and everything was in order. At about seven in the morning, this unknown individual had approached Zef’s campfire from out of the forest. They had spotted him from a distance and followed him, concealing themselves in the bushes, and then chosen a convenient moment to detain him. At first Zef had taken him for a fugitive, then decided that he wasn’t a fugitive but a degenerate, and was on the point of shooting him, but had changed his mind because this man . . . At this point Zef jutted out his beard, at a loss for words, and concluded, “Because it became clear to me that he wasn’t a degenerate.”

  “From what did that become clear to you?” the cornet asked. The detainee just stood there motionless, his arms folded across his powerful chest, glancing at the cornet and Zef by turns.

  Zef said it would be hard for him to explain. In the first place, this man hadn’t been afraid of anything, and he still wasn’t. And in addition, he had taken the soup off the fire and eaten precisely a third of it, exactly as a comrade was supposed to do, and before that he had shouted into the forest, evidently calling to Zef’s men, sensing that they were somewhere nearby. And furthermore, he had tried to feed them mushrooms. The mushrooms were poisonous, and they didn’t eat them or let him eat them, but he had obviously felt an urge to give them some kind of a treat, clearly as a sign of gratitude. And furthermore, everyone knew that no degenerate possesses physical abilities that exceed those of an average, frail person. But on the way here, this man had worn Zef out as if Zef were a little kid, strolling through patches of underbrush and fallen trees as if they were flat ground, jumping across ditches, and then waiting for Zef on the other side. And also, for some reason—maybe out of sheer bravado?—he had sometimes taken Zef in his arms and run two or three hundred strides with him like that.

  The cornet adopted a pose of intense concentration while listening to Zef, but the moment Zef stopped speaking, he abruptly turned to the detainee and barked point-blank at him in Hontian, “Your name? Rank? Assignment?”

  Gai was delighted by the adroitness of the move, but the detainee clearly didn’t understand Hontian either. He bared his magnificent teeth again, slapped himself on the chest, and said “Mah-sim,” then jabbed his finger into the educatee’s side and said “Zef,” and after that he started talking—slowly, with long pauses, pointing up at the ceiling or down at the floor, or running his hands through the air around himself. Gai thought that he picked up several familiar words in this speech, but those words had nothing at all to do with the matter at hand, or with each other. “Bedstead,” the detainee said, and then “Hurly-burly, hurly-burly . . . Squirm . . .”

  When he fell silent, Corporal Varibobu piped up. “I think he’s a cunning spy,” the old inkpot declared. “We should report him to the brigadier.”

  However, the cornet took no notice of him. “You may go, Zef,” he said. “You have demonstrated zeal, and that will be credited to your account.”

  “Most obliged to you, Mr. Cornet,” Zef barked, and he had already turned to go when suddenly the detainee gave a quiet whoop, leaned over the barrier, and grabbed the bundle of blank forms lying on the desk in front of the corporal. The old fogy was frightened to death (how about that for a guardsman!), and he recoiled, flinging his pen at the savage. The savage deftly caught the pen in midair, propped himself against the barrier where he was standing, and started sketching something on a form, taking no notice of Gai or Zef, who had grabbed hold of his sides.

  “As you were!” the cornet ordered, and Gai willingly obeyed; holding this brown bear was just like trying to stop a tank by grabbing hold of its caterpillar tread. The cornet and Zef stood on each side of the detainee and looked at what he was scribbling.

  �
�I think it’s a diagram of the World,” Zef said uncertainly.

  “Hmm . . .” the cornet responded.

  “But of course! There in the center is the World Light, and this here is the World . . . And as he understands things, we are here.”

  “But why is it all flat?” the cornet skeptically asked.

  Zef shrugged. “Perhaps it’s a child’s perception. Infantilism . . . Look here, see? This is how he shows the way he got here.”

  “Yes, possibly. I’ve heard about that kind of insanity.”

  Gai finally managed to squeeze between the firm, smooth shoulder of the detainee and Zef’s prickly ginger thickets. He thought the drawing he saw was funny. It was how schoolchildren in the first grade represented the World: a little circle at the center, signifying the World Light, a large circle around it, signifying the Sphere of the World, and on its circumference, a thick black dot. You only had to add little arms and legs to it and you had “This is the World, and this is me.” The unfortunate freak hadn’t even shown the circumference of the World correctly, he’d drawn some sort of oval. Well, he clearly was deranged . . . And he’d also drawn a dotted line leading from under the ground to that dot, as if to say, Look, that’s how I got here!

  Meanwhile the detainee took another form and rapidly sketched two little Spheres of the World in opposite corners, joined them together with a dotted line, and then drew in some kind of squiggles. Zef whistled hopelessly and asked the cornet, “Permission to retire?”

  But the cornet didn’t let him go. “Uhhh . . . Zef,” he said. “As I recall, you used to be active in the area of . . . uh . . .” He tapped a bent finger against his temple.

  “Yes, sir,” Zef replied after a pause.

  The cornet started striding around the office. “Could you not perhaps . . . uhhh . . . how can I put it . . . formulate your opinion concerning the individual in question? Professionally, if I might express myself in that way.”

  “I couldn’t really say,” said Zef. “Under the terms of my sentence, I have no right to act in a professional capacity.”

  “I understand,” said the cornet. “That’s quite correct. I commend you. Buuut . . .”

  Zef stood there at attention, with his blue eyes open wide. But the cornet was clearly experiencing a certain degree of discomfiture. Gai understood him very well. This was an important incident, of national significance. (What if this savage turned out to be a spy after all?) And HQ medical officer Zogu was a fine guardsman, of course, a brilliant guardsman, but he was only the HQ medical officer. Whereas the ginger roughneck Zef, before he became involved in criminal activities, had been very good at his job and was actually a great celebrity. But it was possible to understand him too. For, after all, everyone, even a criminal, even a criminal who has acknowledged his crime, wants to live. And the law was ruthless with regard to those already condemned to death: the slightest violation meant execution. On the spot. It was the only way; in times like these, leniency turned out to be cruelty and the only true leniency lay in cruelty. The law was ruthless but wise.

  “Well then,” said the cornet. “There’s nothing to be done . . . But, speaking strictly personally—do you really think he’s insane?”

  Zef hesitated again. “Speaking strictly personally?” he repeated. “Well, of course, in speaking strictly personally, a man is inherently inclined to make mistakes . . . Well then, speaking strictly personally, I am inclined to regard this as a clear case of dissociated personality, with displacement and replacement of the genuine ego by an imaginary one. And, speaking strictly personally, on the basis of my own experience of life, I would recommend electroshock and phleoferous medication.”

  Corporal Varibobu stealthily noted all of this down, but the cornet couldn’t be fooled that easily. He took the sheet of paper with the notes from the corporal and stuck it in the pocket of his field jacket. Mah-sim started talking again, addressing the cornet and Zef by turns—there was something he wanted, the poor fellow, something that he thought wasn’t right—but at that point the door opened and the HQ medical officer walked in, apparently having been torn away from his lunch.

  “Greetings, To’ot,” he sullenly declared. “What’s the problem? I see that you are alive and well, and that is some comfort to me. But who is this character?”

  “The educatees caught him in the forest,” the cornet explained. “I suspect that he’s insane.”

  “He’s a malingerer, not a madman,” the medical officer growled, pouring himself a glass of water from the carafe. “Send him back into the forest and let him work.”

  “He’s not one of ours,” the cornet objected. “And we don’t know where he came from. I think the degenerates must have captured him at some time; he went crazy while he was with them and defected to us.”

  “That’s right,” the medic growled. “You’d have to be crazy to defect to us.” He walked over to the detainee and immediately reached out to grab hold of his eyelids. The detainee gave a spine-chilling grin and gently pushed him away. “Hey, hey!” said the medical officer, deftly grabbing hold of his ear. “You just stand still, my fine stallion!”

  The detainee yielded. The medic turned back his eyelids, palpated his neck and throat while whistling to himself, bent the detainee’s arms and straightened them out again, leaned down and struck him below the knees, then went back to the carafe and drank another glass of water.

  “Heartburn,” he announced.

  Gai looked at Zef. The ginger-bearded man was standing off to one side, with his gun set beside his legs, gazing at the wall with emphatic indifference. The medical officer drank his fill and went back to the freak. He felt him and tapped him all over, looked at his teeth, punched him twice in the stomach, and then took a little flat box out of his pocket, unwound a wire, plugged it into a socket, and started applying the little box to various parts of the savage’s body.

  “Right,” he said, coiling up the wire. “And he’s mute too, is he?”

  “No,” said the cornet. “He talks, but in some kind of bear’s language. He only uses our words sometimes, and even then they’re distorted. He doesn’t understand us. And these are his drawings.”

  The HQ medic looked at the drawings. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Amusing.” He grabbed the corporal’s pen and rapidly drew a cat on one of the forms, the way that children draw cats, all sticks and circles. “What do you say to this, my friend?” he asked, handing the drawing to the freak.

  Without pondering for even a second, the freak started scratching away with the pen, and a strange animal, with a thick coat of fur and a heavy, menacing look in its eyes, appeared beside the cat. Gai didn’t know any animal like that, but he did understand one thing: this was nothing like a child’s drawing. It was drawn really well—quite wonderfully, in fact. Just to look at it was frightening. The medical officer reached out his hand for the pen, but the freak moved back and drew a different animal, a totally bizarre one, with huge ears, wrinkly skin, and a thick tail instead of a nose.

  “Wonderful!” the medic exclaimed, slapping his sides.

  However, the freak didn’t stop at that. And what he went on to draw wasn’t an animal but clearly some kind of machine—it looked like a large, transparent shell. He deftly drew in a little figure sitting inside the shell, tapped his finger on the figure, then tapped himself on the chest with the same finger, and said, “Mah-ssim.”

  “He could have seen that thing by the river,” said Zef, who had walked up without being heard. “We burned something like that last night. But those monsters . . .” he shook his head.

  The medical officer seemed to notice him for the first time. “Ah, professor!” he exclaimed with exaggerated delight. “So that’s it, I thought there was an odd stink in the office! Would you be so kind, dear colleague, as to pronounce your wise judgments from that corner over there? You would greatly oblige me . . .”

  Varibobu giggled, and the cornet said in a severe voice, “Stand by the doors, Zef, and don’t forget yo
urself.”

  “Well, all right,” the medic said. “What are you thinking of doing with him, To’ot?”

  “That depends on your diagnosis, Zogu,” the cornet replied. “If he’s a malingerer, I’ll hand him over to the prosecutor’s office, and they’ll get to the bottom of things. But if he’s a madman—”

  “He’s not a malingerer, To’ot,” the HQ medical officer said emphatically. “The prosecutor’s office is definitely not the place for him. But I know a place where they will be interested in him. Where’s the brigadier?”

  “The brigadier is out on the highway.”

  “Well, that doesn’t matter anyway. You’re the duty officer, aren’t you, To’ot? So you just dispatch this extremely curious individual to this address . . .” The medic propped himself against the barrier, shielding himself from everyone with his shoulders and elbows, and wrote something on the back of the last drawing.

  “But what is this?” the cornet asked.

  “This? It’s a certain department that will be grateful to you for your freak, To’ot. I warrant you that.”

  The cornet uncertainly twirled the form in his hands, then walked over to the farthest corner of the office and beckoned the medic with his finger. They talked there for a while in low voices, so that only isolated phrases spoken by Mr. Zogu could be made out: “. . . The Department of Propaganda . . . Send him with a man you can trust . . . It’s not so very secret! . . . I warrant you . . . Order him to forget the matter . . . Damn it, why, a snot-nosed kid won’t understand anything anyway! . . .”