He started. A long, mournful creak suddenly reached them from the fog. Redrick leaped up as if stung, and at the same time, just as abruptly, Arthur leaped up, too. But it was already quiet again, only the sound of gravel clattering down the embankment as it streamed from under their feet.
“That’s probably the ore settling,” Arthur whispered uncertainly, forcing the words out with difficulty. “There’s ore in the cars… they’ve been standing here awhile…”
Redrick stared in front of him without seeing a thing. He’d remembered. It was the middle of the night. He’d been awakened, horror-struck, by the same sound, mournful and drawn out, as if from a dream. Except that it wasn’t a dream. It was the Monkey screaming, sitting on her bed by the window, and his father was responding from the other side of the house—very similarly, with creaky drawn-out cries, but with some kind of added gurgle. And they kept calling back and forth in the dark—it seemed to last a century, a hundred years, and another hundred years. Guta also woke up and held Redrick’s hand, he felt her instantly clammy shoulder against his body, and they lay there for these hundreds and hundreds of years and listened; and when the Monkey quieted down and went to bed he waited a little longer, got up, went down to the kitchen, and greedily drank half a bottle of cognac. That was the night he started binging.
“… the ore,” Arthur was saying. “You know, it settles with time. From the humidity, from erosion, for various other reasons…”
Redrick took a look at his pale face and sat down again. His cigarette had somehow disappeared from his fingers, so he lit a new one.
Arthur stood a little longer, warily looking around, then sat down and said softly, “I know they say there are people living in the Zone. Not aliens—actual people. That they were trapped here during the Visit and mutated… adjusted to new conditions. Have you heard of this, Mr. Schuhart?”
“Yes,” said Redrick. “Except that’s not here. That’s in the mountains. To the northwest. Some shepherds.”
So that’s what he infected me with, he thought. His insanity. That’s why I’ve come here. That’s what I need.
Some strange and very new sensation was slowly filling him. He realized that this sensation wasn’t actually new, that it had long been hiding somewhere inside him, but he only now became aware of it, and everything fell into place. And an idea, which had previously seemed like nonsense, like the insane ravings of a senile old man, turned out to be his sole hope and his sole meaning of life. It was only now that he’d understood—the one thing that he still had left, the one thing that had kept him afloat in recent months, was the hope for a miracle. He, the idiot, the dummy, had been spurning this hope, trampling on it, mocking it, drinking it away—because that’s what he was used to and because his whole life, ever since his childhood, he had never relied on anyone but himself. And ever since his childhood, this self-reliance had always been measured by the amount of money he managed to wrench, wrestle, and wring out of the surrounding indifferent chaos. That’s how it had always been, and that’s how it would have continued, if he hadn’t found himself in a hole from which no amount of money could rescue him, in which self-reliance was utterly pointless. And now this hope—no longer the hope but the certainty of a miracle—was filling him to the brim, and he was already amazed that he’d managed to live in such a bleak, cheerless gloom…
“Hey, stalker,” he said. “Soil your underpants? Get used to it, buddy, don’t be embarrassed, they’ll wash them out at home.”
Arthur looked at him in surprise, smiling uncertainly. Meanwhile, Redrick crumpled the oily sandwich paper, flung it under the railcar, and reclined on his backpack, leaning on his elbows.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s say we assume that this Golden Sphere really can… What would you wish for?”
“So you do believe in it?” Arthur asked quickly.
“It doesn’t matter if I believe in it or not. Answer the question.”
He suddenly became truly interested in what a kid like this could ask the Golden Sphere—still a pipsqueak, yesterday’s schoolboy—and he watched with a lively curiosity as Arthur frowned, fiddled with his mustache, glanced up at him, and lowered his eyes again. “Well, of course, legs for Father,” Arthur said finally. “For things to be good at home…”
“Liar, liar,” said Redrick good-naturedly. “Keep in mind, buddy: the Golden Sphere will only grant your innermost wishes, the kind that, if they don’t come true, you’d be ready to jump off a bridge!”
Arthur Burbridge blushed, sneaked another peak at Redrick, and instantly lowered his eyes, then turned beet red—tears even came into his eyes.
Redrick smirked, looking at him. “I see,” he said almost tenderly. “All right, it’s none of my business. You can keep it to yourself.” And then he remembered the gun and thought that while there was time, he should deal with everything he could. “What’s that in your back pocket?” he asked casually.
“A gun,” grumbled Arthur, and bit his lip.
“What’s it for?”
“Shooting!” Arthur replied defiantly.
“That’s enough of that,” Redrick said strictly and sat up. “Give it to me. There’s no one to shoot in the Zone. Hand it over.”
Arthur wanted to say something, but he kept his mouth shut, reached behind his back, took out a Colt revolver, and handed it to Redrick, holding it by the barrel.
Redrick took the gun by the warm ribbed handle, tossed it up in the air, caught it, and asked, “Do you have a handkerchief or something? Give it to me, I’ll wrap it.”
He took Arthur’s handkerchief, spotless and smelling of cologne, wrapped the gun in it, and placed the bundle on the railroad tie.
“We’ll leave it here for now,” he explained. “God willing, we’ll come back here and pick it up. Maybe we really will have to fight the patrols. Although fighting the patrols, buddy…”
Arthur adamantly shook his head. “That’s not what it’s for,” he said with vexation. “It only has one bullet. In case it happens like with my father.”
“Ohh, I see…” Redrick said slowly, steadily examining him. “Well, you don’t need to worry about that. If it happens like with your father, I’ll manage to drag you here. I promise. Look, dawn is breaking!”
The fog was evaporating before their eyes. It had already vanished from the embankment, while everywhere else around them the milky haze was eroding and melting, and the bristly domes of the hilltops were sprouting through the vapor. Here and there between the hills he could already make out the speckled surface of the soured swamp, covered with sparse malnourished willow bushes, while on the horizon, beyond the hills, the mountain summits blazed bright yellow, and the sky over the mountains was clear and blue. Arthur looked over his shoulder and cried out in admiration. Redrick also turned around. The mountains to the east looked pitch black, while the sky above them shimmered and blazed in a familiar emerald glow—the green dawn of the Zone. Redrick got up and, unbuckling his belt, said, “Aren’t you going to relieve yourself? Keep in mind, we might not have another chance.”
He walked behind the railcar, squatted on the embankment, and, grunting, watched as the green glow quickly faded, the sky flooded with pink, the orange rim of the sun crawled out from behind the mountain range, and the hills immediately began casting lilac shadows. Then everything became sharp, vivid, and clear, and directly in front of him, about two hundred yards away, Redrick saw the helicopter. It looked as if it had fallen right into the center of a bug trap and its entire hull had been squashed into a metal pancake—the only things left intact were the tail, slightly bent, its black hook jutting out over the gap between the hills, and the stabilizing rotor, which noticeably squeaked as it rocked in the breeze. The bug trap must have been powerfuclass="underline" there hadn’t even been a real fire, and the squashed metal clearly displayed the red-and-blue emblem of the Royal Air Force—a symbol Redrick hadn’t seen in so long he thought he might have forgotten what it looked like.