taken for a walk, grating on Priabin's raw nerves. There was no hint of optimism in his hurried stride.
They reached the crest of the slope. The sticks and trellises of the main telemetry complex were only slightly closer than the haze of the old town. He glanced around him wildly. The country was not utterly flat, but undulated gently, pockmarked with dips and hillocks. It looked like some piece of ground that had been heavily shelled. No- man's-land.
'New wire,' Kedrov murmured, his hand touching the bright barbed wire at which they had halted. A warning notice, two more farther off. Death to all intruders, or something of the kind. They put notices like that outside every officers' pisshouse. There were no guards, no dogs, nothing.
'Christ!' he cried out. 'Look at it. There's nothing here except the old silos.'
'New wire,' Kedrov persisted.
'That's what we came out here to find?'
'No — signs of recent work,' Kedrov snapped back at his cynicism.
Priabin scanned the landscape in front of him. Heavy tires, rubble heaped and scattered, but nothing, nothing real. He bent down and scrabbled in the toolbox. Found the heavy-duty pliers, checked their edges.
'Watch out,' Priabin ordered. 'I'm not climbing through this mess. Let's see if these will cut—' He grunted with effort, struggling and twisting the wire, attempting to cut through it. Even in the icy wind, sweat prickled on his forehead and was damp inside his shirt. The wire would not cut. Furiously, he kicked at one of the wooden posts holding the wire taut. Then kicked again and again. It struggled out of the grip of the frozen earth and leaned drunkenly, dragging the four strands of wire toward the ground.
He stepped across the sagging wire.
'Come on — and bring the toolbox.' Which is no bloody use whatsoever, he told himself.
The earth and the icy puddles cracked and ripped as they hurried across the empty landscape.
'What should we look for?' he demanded.
'Signs of repair — lack of rust…' Kedrov's voice faded into uncertainty.
More ruts from heavy tires, even the tracks of a bulldozer. A hundred yards and more from the new wire, they reached a silo shaft's steel doors, which were pitted and rusting. Priabin stood on them, stamping a din from the metal, as he gazed around him. He could distinguish as many as forty — well, thirty — of these silo entrances scattered over the ground and looking like giant antipersonnel mines. They rose only a few feet above the surface, while the shafts beneath them descended hundreds of feet into the earth.
'Don't waste time. We'll split up — check as many as you can. Oh, Christ, all right, I'll take the toolbox.' He bared his teeth. 'Get moving.'
There was a moment of pathetic doubt on Kedrov's face, and the afterdrug vacancy returned; then he turned to scan the landscape, picking out the closest silos
'I'll shout,' he offered, 'and wave if I find anything.' It was as if he had patted Priabin's forearm to comfort him. He seemed to draw on some reserve of optimism, and smiled encouragingly.
Priabin scuttled toward another shaft, turning only once to see Kedrov blown like a brown rag across the landscape. The second and third sets of silo doors were dirt-encrusted, with stiff blades of grass appearing to spring from the metal. He hurried on.
Four now, all of them unused for years. Six, and still nothing but pitted doors and the mouths of air ducts with rusty wire gratings across them, but tire tracks and caterpillar-track indentations going everywhere and nowhere. He transferred the toolbox once more from his left hand to his right. He seemed to be staggering along now, buffeted by the icy wind. If he so much as thought for a moment about his task, it would be like colliding with a solid wall.
The wind shouted, faintly.
Groggily, he looked up. A brown scarecrow was waving its outstretched arms.
Kedrov. Waving and shouting like a drowning swimmer.
He ran toward Kedrov, who seemed to be dancing with excitement, Pieces of abandoned metal glinted in the sun. Not rusty, then — even half-bricks, oil stains, too, scraps of electrical cable.
'What?' he gasped at Kedrov, dropping the toolbox, bent double to catch his breath. 'What is it?'
'These doors have been replaced — look!'
The metal doors of the shaft, shut tight, gleamed like a polished mirror. Rodin was down there somewhere, he knew it!
'Thank God,' he breathed. 'How do we get down there? What do we do?'
'The closest air shaft's over there, about sixty yards away. We climb down the tunnel, find the doors to the silo shaft—'
'And?'
'Get into the shaft through the service doors. Stop the thing coming up — cut the wires.' It was the exasperation of a technician toward the technically illiterate. Kedrov seemed to have found his daydream of America once more. Priabin nodded.
'You'll have to help.'
'I can't go down there.'
'I don't care if you didn't like it last time. You're coming with me.'
Priabin knelt down and pressed his cheek to the icy metal of the closed doors. He heard, faint but distinct, the humming of machinery or electronics. Ana a rumbling noise, as it a train were passing through the earth a long way down. It
'Good, down the air shaft, then. Come on.'
They ran to the air shaft's rusty grating. The jack handle from the toolbox levered the mesh away from the mouth of the narrow shaft. A flight of rungs set in the concrete disappeared into the darkness — no, there was a faint glow of light from the bottom. He turned and began to climb backward into the shaft, his feet feeling for the nearest rungs. He gestured at Kedrov to hand him the toolbox.
'Come on!' he yelled. His voice echoed betrayingly down the shaft.
Kedrov was not looking at him. His head was turned toward the silo. Then his face snapped back, mouth open, eyes wide.
'The doors are opening!'
'What?'
'The doors — they're opening. It must be coming up.'
Priabin scrambled out of the shaft like a demented old man. He even crawled a few paces before getting to his feet, eyes staring wildly toward the silo. A hole in the ground now, no gleam of metal. He wanted to scream away the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He was too late, he could do nothing. Rodin had won. The thought obsessed him. There was no room for any speck of rationality in his head.
Rodin.
He was down there, hundreds of feet below him, just there. He banged the jack handle on the frozen ground, feeling the shock pass through his wrist and arm and reach his shoulder. Rodin was down there, laughing while he started the next fucking war.
'Look.' Kedrov was shaking his arm, and pointing. Priabin whirled on him, the jack handle raised. 'Look!'
It was coming out of the silo like some nightmarish plant, its growing cycle speeded up by a time-lapse camera. Dish aerial, transmitters, the platform on the metal stalk of an old missile hoist. Twenty feet into the air. It grew further and began to move. The dish aerial seemed to turn in their direction like a single, silver eye, then tilted toward the pale afternoon.
'Christ, oh, Christ,' Priabin heard himself muttering.
Kedrov was separate from his desperation. Detached and blown like a brown leaf across the sixty yards to the silo.
'Wait — wait!' Priabin bellowed.
And was running, stumbling like an exhausted athlete. The jack handle like a heavy baton in his hand. Ahead of him, he could see the bottom of Kedrov's stolen overcoat flying in the wind, his arms waving as if he were swimming against the air's current. The plant had grown taller, thicker-stemmed. Its silver eye winked in the sun, watching the sky, swiveling. The spars and sticks of the other aerials and transmitters seemed to move, too.
He was out of breath, dragging in lungfals of air as if at some great altitude. His chest was tight and aching.
