Noon, 22nd Century Page 33

  Pebbles showered down from above. Sidorov looked up and saw Galtsev descending toward him. Sorochinsky was coming down the opposite wall.

  “Where are you going?” Sidorov asked.

  Sorochinsky answered in a small voice, “We want to help, sir.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “We only…” Sorochinsky began, and hesitated.

  A crack opened up along the wall behind Sidorov.

  “Look out!” yelled Sorochinsky.

  Sidorov stepped to the side, tripped over the shell, and fell. He landed face down and immediately turned over on his back. The dome rocked, and ponderously collapsed, burying its scorching-hot edge deep into the black ground. The ground trembled. Hot air lashed Sidorov’s face.

  * * *

  A white haze hung over the knoll, where the dome, sticking up out of the crater, shone dimly. Something was still smouldering there, and from time to time it gave off muffled crackling sounds. Galtsev, his eyes red, was sitting with his arms around his knees, looking at the knoll too. His arms were wound with bandages and the entire left half of his face was black with dirt and soot. He had not yet washed it off, although the sun had risen long ago. Sorochinsky was sleeping by the campfire, the suede jacket covering his head.

  Sidorov lay down on his back and placed his hands under his head. He didn’t want to look at the knoll, at the white haze, at Galtsev’s fierce-looking face. It was very pleasant lying there and staring into the blue, blue sky. You could look into that sky for hours. He had known that when he was an Assaultman, when he had jumped for the north pole of Vladislava, when he had stormed Belinda, when he had sat alone in a smashed boat on Transpluto. There was no sky at all there, just a black starry void and one blinding star—the Sun. He had thought then that he would give the last minutes of his life if only he could see a blue sky once more. On Earth that feeling had quickly been forgotten. It had been that way even before, when for years at a time he had not seen blue sky, and each second of those years could have been his last. But it did not befit an Assaultman to think about death. Though on the other hand you had to think a lot about possible defeats. Gorbovsky had once said that death is worse than any defeat, even the most shattering. Defeat was always really only an accident, a setback which you could surmount. You had to surmount it. Only the dead couldn’t fight on. But no, the dead could fight on, and even inflict a defeat.

  Sidorov lifted himself up a little and looked at Galtsev, and wanted to ask him what he thought about all this. Galtsev had also been an Assaultman. True, he had been a bad Assaultman. And probably he thought that there was nothing in the world worse than defeat.

  Galtsev turned his head slowly, moved his lips, and said suddenly, “Your eyes are red, sir.”

  “Yours too,” said Sidorov. He should get in touch with Fischer and tell him everything that had happened. He got up and, walking slowly over the grass, headed for the pterocar. He walked with his head back, and looked at the sky. You could stare at the sky for hours—it was so blue and so astonishingly beautiful. The sky you came back to be under.

  19. The Meeting

  Aleksandr Kostylin stood in front of his enormous desk and examined the slick, glossy photographs.

  “Hello, Lin,” the Hunter said to him.

  Kostylin raised a high-browed bald head and shouted in English, “Ah! Home is the sailor, home from the sea!”

  “And the hunter home from the hill,” the Hunter finished. They hugged each other.

  “What have you got to delight me this time?” Kostylin asked in a businesslike tone. “Are you in from Yaila?”

  “Right. Straight from the Thousand Swamps.” The Hunter sat down in an armchair and stretched out his legs. “And you’re getting fatter and balder, Lin. Sedentary life will be the death of you. Next time I’ll take you with me.”

  Kostylin touched his potbelly worriedly. “Yes,” he said. “Terrible. Getting old and fat. The old soldiers are fading away. So, did you bring me anything interesting?”

  “Not really, Lin. Nothing much. Ten two-headed snakes, a few new species of polyvalved mollusks. What have you got there?” He reached out a hand and took the packet of photographs from the desk.

  “Some greenhorn brought that in. You know him?”

  “No.” The Hunter examined the photographs. “Not bad. It’s Pandora, of course.”

  “Right. Pandora. The giant crayspider. A very large specimen.”

  “Yes,” said the Hunter, looking at the ultrasonic carbine propped for scale against the bare yellow paunch of the cray-spider. “A pretty good specimen for a beginner. But I’ve seen bigger. How many times did he fire?”

  “He says twice. Hit the main nerve center both times.”

  “He should have fired an anesthetic needle. The lad got a little riled up.” With a smile, the Hunter examined the photograph where the excited greenhorn trampled the dead monster. “Well, okay. How are things with you at home?”

  Kostylin waved a hand. “Chock full of matrimony. All the girls are getting married. Marta got hitched to a hydrologist.”

  “Which Marta?” asked the Hunter. “The granddaughter?”

  “Great-granddaughter, Pol! Great-granddaughter!”

  “Yes, we’re getting old.” The Hunter laid the photographs on the table and got up. “Well, I’m off.”

  “Again?” Kostylin said in vexation. “Isn’t enough enough?”

  “No, Lin. I have to do it. We’ll meet in the usual place afterward.” The Hunter nodded to Lin and left. He went down to the park and headed for the pavilions. As usual, there were many people at the museum. People walked along lanes planted with orange Venusian palms, crowded around the terrariums, and over the pools of transparent water.

  Children romped in the high grass between the trees-they were playing Martian hide-and-seek. The Hunter stopped to watch. It was a very absorbing game. A long time ago the first mimicrodons—large, melancholic lizards ideally suited to sharp changes in their living conditions—had been brought from Mars to Earth. They possessed an unusually well-developed ability to change their skin color, and had the run of the museum park. Small children amused themselves by hunting for them—this required no little sharp-sightedness and agility—and then dragged them from place to place so they could watch the mimicrodons change color. The lizards were large and heavy; the little kids dragged them by the scruffs of their necks. The mimicrodons put up no resistance. They seemed to like it.

  The Hunter passed an enormous transparent covering, under which the terrarium “Meadow from the Planet Ruzhen” was located. There, in pale blue grass, the funny rambas—giant, amazingly varicolored insects a little like terrestrial grasshoppers—jumped and fought. The Hunter remembered how, twenty years earlier, he had first gone hunting on Ruzhen. He had stayed in ambush for three days, waiting for something, and the enormous iridescent rambas had hopped around him and sat on the barrel of his carbine. There were always a lot of people around the “Meadow,” because the rambas were very funny and very pretty.

  Near the entrance to the central pavilion, the Hunter stopped by a railing surrounding a deep round tank, almost a well. In the tank, in water illuminated by violet light, a long hairy animal circled tirelessly—it was an ichthyotherion, the only warmblooded animal to breathe with gills. The ichthyotherion moved constantly—it had swum in those circles one year ago, and five years ago, and forty years ago, when the Hunter had first seen it. The famous Sallier had captured the animal with enormous difficulty. Now Sallier was long dead, and his body reposed somewhere in the jungles of Pandora, while his ichthyotherion still circled and circled in the violet water of the tank.

  The Hunter stopped again in the lobby of the main pavilion and sat down in a soft armchair in the corner. The whole center of the bright hall was taken up by a stuffed flying leech—sora-tobu hiru (Martian Wildlife, Solar System, Carbon Cycle, Type—Polychordate, Class—Pneumatoderm, Order, Genus, Species—sora-tobu hiru). The flying leech was one of the oldest exh
ibits of the Capetown Museum of Exozoology. This loathsome monster had been holding its maw, like a multijawed power shovel, agape in the face of everyone who had come into the pavilion for a century and a half. Thirty feet long, covered with shiny hard hair, eyeless, noseless. The former master of Mars.

  Yes, those were the times on Mars, thought the Hunter. Times you won’t forget. Half a century ago these monsters had been almost completely exterminated. Then suddenly they started multiplying again, and started preying on the lines of communication between the Martian bases, just like in the old days. That was when the famous global hunt was organized. I bumped along in a crawler and couldn’t see a thing through the dust clouds the crawler treads had raised. Yellow sand tanks crammed with volunteers were darting along to my left and my right Just after one tank came out onto a dune, it suddenly overturned, and people spilled out of it every which way—and just then we came out of the dust, and Elmer grabbed my shoulder and started yelling, and pointing ahead. And I saw leeches, hundreds of leeches, whirling on the saline flat in the low place between the dunes. I started firing, and other people began shooting too, and all the while Elmer was fooling with his homemade rocket launcher, and he just couldn’t get it working. Everyone was shouting and swearing at him, even threatening him, but no one could move away from his carbine. The ring of hunters closed up, and we already could see the flashes of fire from the crawlers on the other side, and right then Elmer shoved the rusty pipe of his cannon between me and the driver, and there was a terrible roar and thunder, and I collapsed onto the floor of the crawler, blinded and deafened. Thick black smoke covered the saline flat, all the vehicles stopped, and the people stopped shooting and only yelled and waved their carbines. In five minutes Elmer had used up his ammunition supply, and the crawlers pushed on across the flat, and we started wiping out anything that remained alive after Elmer’s rockets. The leeches darted between the vehicles, or got crushed under the tracks, and I kept shooting and shooting and shooting—I was young then, and I really liked shooting. Unfortunately I was always an excellent shot—I never missed. And unfortunately I didn’t confine my shooting to Mars and to disgusting predators. It would have been better if I had never seen a carbine in my life.

  He got up, went around the stuffed flying leech, and plodded along the galleries. Obviously he looked bad, for many people were stopping and staring at him anxiously. Finally one girl went up to him and timidly asked whether there was something she could do.

  “Come now, my girl,” said the Hunter. He forced himself to smile, and he stuck two fingers in his chest pocket and drew out a beauty of a shell from Yaila. “This is for you,” he said. “I brought it from quite a way off.”

  She smiled faintly and took the shell. “You look very bad,” she said.

  “I’m no longer young, child,” said the Hunter. “We old people rarely look good. Too much wear on the soul.”

  Probably the girl didn’t understand him, but then he did not want her to. He stared over her head and went on. Only now he threw back his shoulders and tried to hold himself erect, so that people would not stare at him any more.

  All I need is to have little girls feeling sorry for me, he thought. I’ve come completely unstuck. Probably I shouldn’t come back to Earth any more. Probably I should stay on Yaila forever, settle on the edge of the Thousand Swamps and set out traps for ruby eels. No one knows the Thousand Swamps better than I—and that would be just the place for me. There’s a lot there to keep a hunter who won’t fire a gun busy.

  He stopped. He always stopped here. In an elongated glass case, on pieces of gray sandstone, stood a wrinkled, unprepossessing, grayish stuffed lizard, with its three pairs of rough legs spread wide. The gray hexapod evoked no emotions from the uninformed visitors. Few of them knew the wrinkled hexapod’s wonderful story. But the Hunter knew it, and when he stopped here he always felt a certain superstitious thrill at the mighty power of life. This lizard had been killed ten parsecs from the sun, its body had been prepared, and the dry stuffed carcass had stood for two years on this pedestal. Then one fine day, before the eyes of the museum visitors, ten tiny quick-moving hexapods had crawled from the wrinkled gray hide of their parent. They had immediately died in Earth’s atmosphere, burned up from an excess of oxygen, but the commotion had been frightful, and the zoologists did not know to this day how such a thing could have happened. Life was indeed the only thing in existence that merited worship…

  The Hunter wandered through the galleries, switching from pavilion to pavilion. The bright African sun—the good, hot sun of Earth—shone down on beasts born under other suns hundreds of billions of miles away, beasts now sealed in vitriplast. Almost all of them were familiar to the Hunter-he had seen them many times, and not only in the museum. Sometimes he stopped in front of new exhibits, and read the strange names of the strange animals, and the familiar names of the hunters.

  “Maltese sword,”

  “speckled zo,”

  “great ch’i-ling,”

  “lesser ch’i-ling,”

  “webbed capuchin,”

  “black scarecrow,”

  “queen swan”… Simon Kreutzer, Vladimir Babkin, Bruno Bellar, Nicholas Drew, Jean Sallier fils. He knew them all and was now the oldest of them, although not the most successful. He rejoiced to learn that Sallier fils had at last bagged a scaly cryptobranchiate, that Vladimir Babkin had gotten a live glider slug back to Earth, and that Bruno Bellar had at last shot that hooknose with the white webbing that he had been hunting on Pandora for several years.

  In this way he arrived at Pavilion Ten, where there were many of his own trophies. Here he stopped at almost every exhibit, remembering and relishing. Here’s the flying carpet, also known as the falling leaf. I tracked it for four days. That was on Ruzhen, where it rains so seldom, where the distinguished zoologist Ludwig Porta died so long ago. The flying carpet moves very quickly and has very acute hearing. You can’t hunt it in a vehicle—it has to be tracked day and night, by searching out faint, oily traces on the leaves of trees. I tracked this one down once, and since that time no one else has, and Sallier père used to get on his high horse and say that it was a lucky accident. The Hunter ran his finger with pride across the letters cut into the descriptive plaque: “Acquired and Prepared by Hunter P. Gnedykh.” I fired four times and didn’t miss once, but it was still alive when it collapsed on the ground, breaking branches off of the green tree trunks. That was back when I still carried a gun.

  And there’s the eyeless monster from the heavy-water swamps of Vladislava. Eyeless and formless. No one had any idea what form to give it when they mounted it for exhibit, and so finally they did it to match the best photograph. I chased it through the swamp to the edge, where several pitfalls were set up, and it fell into one and roared for a long time there and it took two bucketsful of beta-novocaine to put it to sleep. That was fairly recently, ten years ago, and by then I wouldn’t use a gun. Pleased to meet you again, monster.

  The farther the Hunter went into the galleries of Pavilion Ten, the slower his steps became. Because he didn’t want to go farther. Because he couldn’t go farther. Because the most important meeting was coming up. And with every step he felt more keenly the familiar melancholy sense of helplessness. The round white eyes were already staring at him out of the clear plastic case…

  As usual, he went up to the small exhibit with his head bowed, and first of all he read the notation on the descriptive plaque, which he already knew by heart: “Wildlife of the Planet Crookes, System of EN 92, Carbon Cycle, Type—Monochordate, Class, Order, Genus, Species—Quadrabrachium tridactylus. Acquired by Hunter P. Gnedykh, Prepared by Doctor A. Kostylin.” Then he raised his eyes.

  Under the transparent plastic cover, on a polished slanting plate, lay a head—strongly flattened in the vertical plane, bare and black, with a flat, oval face. The skin on the face was smooth as a drumhead, and there were no teeth, no mouth, no nose apertures. There were only eyes. Round, white, with small black
pupils, and remarkably widely spaced. The right eye was slightly damaged, and this gave a strange expression to its dead gaze. Lin was a superb taxidermist—the threefinger had had exactly that expression when the Hunter first bent over it in the fog. That had been long ago.

  Seventeen years ago. Why did it happen? thought the Hunter. I hadn’t even planned on going hunting there, Crookes had said that there was no life there, except bacteria and land crabs. And still, when Sanders asked me to take a look around the area, I grabbed my carbine.

  Fog hung over the rocky screes. A small red sun—the red dwarf EN 92—was rising, and the fog looked reddish. Rocks crunched under the rover’s soft treads, and low crags swam out of the fog one after another. Then something started rustling on the crest on the top of one of the crags, and the Hunter stopped his vehicle. It was impossible to get a good look at the animal at this distance. Furthermore, the fog and the murky illumination lowered the visibility. But the Hunter had an experienced eye. Some sort of large vertebrate was of course stealing along the crest of the crag, and the Hunter was glad that he had brought his carbine along after all. We’ll show up old Crookes, he thought gaily. He raised the hatch, stuck the barrel of his carbine out carefully, and started to aim. At a moment when the fog had gotten a little thinner and the hunched-up silhouette of the animal showed up distinctly against a background of reddish sky, the Hunter fired. Immediately a blinding violet flash rose up from the place where the animal had been. Something made a loud crash, and a long hissing sound could be heard. Then clouds of gray smoke rose up over the crest and mixed with the fog.

  The Hunter was greatly surprised. He remembered loading the carbine with anesthetic needles, and the last thing you would expect from them would be an explosion like this one. He climbed out of the rover and started looking for his kill. He found it where he had expected, under the crag on the rocky scree. It really was a four-legged or four-armed animal, the size of a large Great Dane. It was frightfully burned and mutilated, and the Hunter was amazed by what horrible effect an ordinary anesthetic needle had had. It was hard even to imagine the original appearance of the animal. Only the forepart of the head—a flattened oval, covered with smooth black skin, with lifeless white eyes—remained relatively intact.