only thing I heard was the web tearing. It was a weak crackly noise. I was crouched there with my eyes shut, unable to feel my arms or my legs, when Kirill spoke.
“Well, shall we get on with it?”
“Let’s go.”
We picked up the empty and headed for the door, walking sideways. It was terrifically heavy, the bitch, it was hard for the two of us to drag it. We came out into the sun and stopped by the boot. Tender reached out for it.
“OK,” said Kirill. “One, two…”
“No,” I said. “Let’s wait a sec. Put it down first.”
We set it down.
“Turn around. Let’s see your back.”
He turned without a single word. I looked—there was nothing on his back. I turned him this way and that, but there was nothing. I looked back at the canisters, and there was nothing there either.
“Listen,” I said to Kirill, still looking at the canisters. “Did you see the spider web?”
“What web? Where?”
“All right. We were lucky.”
But to myself I thought: actually, there’s no way of knowing that yet.
“All right, let’s heave-ho.”
We stuffed the empty into the boot and fixed it so that it wouldn’t move around. There it was, the pussycat, shiny new and clean, the copper gleaming in the sun. Its blue filling sifted cloudily in slow streams between the disks. We could see that it wasn’t an empty at all, but something like a vessel, like a glass jar with blue syrup. We looked at it some more and then clambered into the boot and set off on the return trip without messing around.
These scientists sure have it easy! First of all, they work in daylight. And second, the only hard part is getting into the Zone. On the way back, the boot drives itself. In other words, it has a mechanism, a coursograph, I guess you’d call it, that controls the boot and drives it exactly along the course it took coming in. As we floated back, it repeated all our maneuvers, stopping and hovering for a bit, and then continuing. We went over each of my nuts and bolts. I could have gathered them up if I had wanted to.
My greenhorns were in a great mood, of course. They were turning their heads every which way and their fear was almost all gone. They started gabbing. Tender was waving his arms around and threatening to come right back after dinner to lay the road to the garage. Kirill plucked at my sleeve and started explaining his graviconcentrate phenomenon to me—that is, the mosquito mange spot. Well, I set them straight, but not right away. I calmly told them about all the jerks who blew it on the way back. Shut up, I told them, and keep your eyes peeled, or the same thing will happen to you that happened to Shorty Lyndon. That worked. They didn’t even ask what had happened to Shorty Lyndon. We floated along in silence and I only thought about one thing. How I would unscrew the cap. I was trying to picture my first gulp, but the web kept glistening before my eyes.
In short, we got out of the Zone, and we were sent into the delouser—the scientists call it the medical hangar—along with the boot. They washed us in three different boiling vats and in their alkaline solutions, smeared us with some gunk, sprinkled us with some powder, and washed us again, then dried us off and said, OK, friends, you’re free! Tender and Kirill dragged the empty. There were so many people who had come to gawk that you couldn’t push your way through them. And it was so typical. They were all just watching and grunting words of welcome, but not one was brave enough to lend a hand to the tired returnees. All right, that was none of my business. Now nothing concerned me any more.
I pulled off my special suit, threw it on the floor—let the bastard sergeants pick it up—and headed straight for the showers, because I was sopping wet from head to toe. I locked myself in a stall, got my flask, unscrewed the cap, and attached myself to it like a lamprey. I sat on the bench, my knees empty, my head empty, my soul empty. Gulping down the strong stuff like it was water. Alive. The Zone had let me out. It let me out, the bitch. The damn, treacherous bitch. I was alive. The greenhorns could never appreciate that. Only a stalker could. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, from the booze or what, I don’t know. I sucked the flask dry. I was wet, and the flask was dry. It didn’t have that one last gulp that I needed, of course. But that could be fixed. Everything could be fixed now. Alive. I lit a cigarette. I sat there and felt that I was coming round. The bonus pay came into my mind. That was a good deal we had at the institute. I could go right now and pick up the envelope. Or maybe they’d bring it to me here in the showers.
I started undressing slowly. I took off my watch, and saw that we had spent five hours in the Zone. My God! Five hours. I shuddered.
God, there really is no time in the Zone. Five hours. But if you think about it, what’s five hours to a stalker? A snap. How about twelve? Or how about two days? If you don’t manage in one night, you spend the whole day face down on the ground. And you don’t even pray, but mutter deliriously, and you don’t know if you’re dead or alive. And then you finish up the second night and get to the patrol point with your swag. The guards are there with their machine guns. And those bastards, those toads really hate you. There’s no great joy in arresting you, they’re terrified that you’re contaminated. All they want to do is bump you off and they’ve got all the aces—go prove that you were killed illegally. So that means you bury your face in the dirt again and pray until dawn and until dark again. And the swag lies next to you and you don’t know whether it’s just lying there or slowly killing you. Or you could end up like Knuckles Itzak, who got stuck at dawn in an open space. He got off the track and ended up between two ditches. He couldn’t go right or left. They shot at him for two hours, but couldn’t hit him. For two hours he made believe he was dead. Thank God, they finally believed it and left. I saw him after that. I couldn’t even recognize him. He was a broken man, no longer human.
I wiped my tears and turned on the water. I showered for a long time. First hot, then cold, then hot again. I used up a whole bar of soap. Then I got bored. I turned off the shower. Someone was banging on the door. Kirill was shouting:
“Hey, you stalker! Come on out of there! There’s a scent of the green around here.”
Greenbacks, that’s always good. I opened the door. He was standing there, half naked, in his shorts. He was ecstatic, his melancholy gone. He handed me the envelope.
“Here,” he said. “From a grateful humanity.”
“I spit on your humanity. How much is there?”
“In view of your bravery beyond the call of duty, and as an exception, two months’ pay!”
Yes, I could live on that kind of money. If I could get two months’ pay for every empty, I could have sent Ernest packing a long time ago.
“Well, are you pleased?” He was glowing, positively radiant, grinning from ear to ear.
“Not bad. And you?”
He didn’t answer. He hugged my neck, pressed me to his sweaty chest, pushed me away, and disappeared into the next stall.
“Hey!” I shouted after him. “How’s Tender? Washing out his underpants, I bet?”
“No way. Tender is surrounded by reporters. You should see him. He’s such a big shot. He’s telling them authoritatively…”
“How is he telling them?”
“Authoritatively.”
“OK, sir. Next time I’ll bring my dictionary along, sir.” Then it was like an electric shock. “Wait, Kirill. Come out here.”
“I’m naked.”
“Come out. I’m not a dame.”
He came out. I took him by the shoulders and turned his back toward me. Nope. I must have imagined it. His back was clean. The rivulets of sweat dried up.
“What’s with you and my back?” he asked.
I kicked him in his bare can and dove into my stall and locked the door. Damn my nerves. I was seeing things there, and now I was seeing them here. The hell with it all! I’d get tanked up tonight. I’d really like to beat Richard, that’s what I’d like. That bum can really play cards. Can’t beat him with any hand. I tried reshuffling, even blessing them under the table.
“Kirill,” I shouted. “Are you going to the Borscht tonight?”
“It’s not the ‘Borscht,’ it’s pronounced ‘Borshch.’ How many times do I have to tell you.”
