Why doesn’t it do anything to him? thought Belov. Can he really be made of iron? Or do you get used to it? Good lord, if I could just see the sky. Just so I see the sky, and I’ll never go on another deep-water search. Just so the photos come out. I’m tired. But he’s not tired at all. He’s sitting there practically upside down, and it doesn’t do anything to him. And for me, just one look at the way he’s sitting is enough to make me sick to my stomach.
Three hundred meters.
“Kondratev,” Belov said again. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Kondratev answered, “Han Choi and Valtsev are arriving tomorrow morning with their submarines—in the evening well comb the depression and finish off the rest.”
Tomorrow evening Kondratev was going down into that grave again. And he could say that calmly, with pleasure.
“Akiko-san.”
“Yes, Comrade Belov?”
“What are you going to do tomorrow?” he asked in English.
Kondratev glanced at the bathymeter. Two hundred meters.
Akiko sighed. “I don’t know,” she said.
They fell silent. They remained silent until the minisub had surfaced.
“Open the hatch,” Kondratev said.
The submarine rocked on a small wave. Belov raised his arms, turned the catch of the hatch fastener, and pushed on the hatch cover.
The weather had changed. There was no more wind, nor storm clouds. The stars were small and bright, and a sliver of moon hung in the sky. Small shining waves lazily swept the ocean. They splashed and murmured at the hatch turret. Belov scrambled out first. Akiko and Kondratev climbed after him. Belov said, “Nice. It’s nice.”
Akiko also said, “Nice.”
Kondratev too affirmed that it was nice, and added, after some thought, “Just wonderful.”
“Permission to go swimming, Comrade Captain,” said Akiko.
“Swim, please,” Kondratev conceded politely, and turned around.
Akiko stripped down to her swimming suit, laid her clothes on the edge of the hatch, and stuck a foot in the water. Her red suit looked almost black, and her arms and legs unnaturally white. She raised her arms and slipped noiselessly into the water.
“I think I’ll go in too,” said Belov. He undressed and climbed into the ocean. The water was warm. Belov swam to the stern and said, “It’s wonderful. You were right, Kondratev.”
Then he remembered the violet tentacle as thick as a telephone pole and he hurriedly scrambled back onto the submarine deck. Going over to the hatch on which Kondratev was sitting, he said, “The water is as warm as soup. You should have a dip.”
They sat silently while Akiko splashed in the water. The black spot of her head bobbed against a background of shining waves.
“Tomorrow we’ll finish them all off,” Kondratev said. “All of them, however many are left. We’ve got to hurry. The whales will be arriving in a week.”
Belov sighed and did not answer.
Akiko swam up and grasped the edge of the hatch. “Comrade Captain, may I go with you again tomorrow?” she asked with desperate audacity.
Kondratev said slowly, “Of course you can.”
“Thank you, Comrade Captain.”
To the south, over the horizon, the beam of a searchlight rose up, jabbing into the sky. It was the signal from the Kunashir.
“Let’s go,” said Kondratev, getting up. “Come on out, Akiko-san.”
He took her by the arm and easily lifted her from the water.
Belov said gloomily, “I’ll see how the film came out. If it’s bad, I’ll come down with you too.”
“But no cognac,” said Kondratev.
“And no perfume,” added Akiko.
“Anyhow, I’ll ask Han Choi,” said Belov. “Three’s a crowd in one of these cabins.”
13. The Mystery of the Hind Leg
“I didn’t like your first book,” said Parncalas. “There is nothing in it to stir the imagination of the serious person.”
They were sitting in lounge chairs under a faded hot awning on the veranda of Cold Creek Post—Jean Parncalas, biotechnician of the Gibson Reserve, and Evgeny Slavin, correspondent for the European Information Center. On the low table between the lounge chairs stood a sweating five-liter siphon bottle. Cold Creek Post was on the top of a hill, and an excellent view of the hot, blue-green savanna of western Australia opened up from the veranda.
“A book should always rouse the imagination,” Parncalas continued. “Otherwise it is not a real book, but merely a rotten textbook. In essence, we could put it thus: the purpose of a book is to arouse the imagination of the reader. True, your first book was intended to fulfill another, no less important function as well, namely to bring to us the viewpoint of a man of your heroic era. I expected a great deal from that book, but alas, it is obvious that in the course of the work you lost that very point of view. You are too impressionable, Evgeny mon ami!”
“It’s simpler than that, Jean,” Evgeny said lazily. “Much simpler, mon ami. I had a great horror of appearing before the human race as a sort of Campanella in reverse. But anyhow, you’re quite correct. It was a mediocre book.”
He leaned over in the lounge chair and filled a tall narrow glass with foaming coconut milk from the siphon bottle. The glass instantly started sweating.
“Yes,” said Parncalas, “you had a great horror of being Campanella in reverse. You were in too much of a hurry to change your psychology, Evgeny. You wanted very much to stop being an alien here. And that was wrong. You should have remained an alien a little longer: you could have seen much that we do not notice. And isn’t that the most important task of any writer—to notice things that others do not see? That is, rousing the imagination and making people think?”
“Perhaps.”
They fell silent. Profound quiet reigned all around, the drowsy quiet of the savanna at noon. Cicadas chirred, vying with one another. A slight breeze rose up, rustling the grass. Piercing sounds arrived from far off-the cries of emus. Evgeny suddenly sat up and craned his neck. “What’s that?” he asked.
Past the post, darting through the high grass, rushed a strange machine—a long vertical pole, evidently on wheels, with a sparkling revolving disk on the end. The machine looked extremely ridiculous. Bobbing and swinging, it went off toward the south.
Parncalas raised his head and looked. “Ah,” he said. “I forgot to tell you. That’s one of the monsters.”
“What monsters?”
“No one knows,” Parncalas said calmly.
Evgeny jumped up and ran over to the railing. The tall, ridiculous pole was quickly receding, swaying from side to side, and in a minute it had disappeared from view. He turned to Parncalas.
“What do you mean nobody knows?” he asked.
Parncalas drank his coconut milk. “No one knows,” he repeated, wiping his mouth. “It’s a very amusing story—you’ll like it. They first appeared two weeks ago—these poles on one wheel and the crawling disks. You often see them in the savanna between Cold Creek and Rollins, and the day before yesterday one pole got as far as the main street of Gibson. My emus trampled one disk. I saw it—a big scrapheap of bad plastic and the remains of a radio installation on perfectly disgusting-looking ceramic. Like a schoolchild’s model. We got in touch with the people at Gibson, but no one there knew anything. And, it became clear, no one anywhere knows anything.”
Parncalas again raised the glass to his lips.
“You’re discussing this surprisingly calmly, Jean mon ami,” Evgeny said impatiently. Pictures, were forming in his imagination, one more fantastic than the next.