The automatic twirled in his hands, swinging round with the butt forward, and struck her on the temple, mercifully snuffing out the light of her consciousness.
After Nakhimov Prospect Hunter had kept Homer close beside him, and the old man had no chance to examine the notepad properly. The brigadier was suddenly thoughtful and considerate: not only did he try not to leave his companion too far behind, he actually walked in step with him, although he had to hold himself back to do it. A couple of times he stopped, as if to see whether anyone was dogging their footsteps. But as the glaring beam of his searchlight was turned backwards, it always ran across Homer’s face, making the old man feel like he was in a torture chamber. He swore and blinked as he struggled to recover, sensing the brigadier’s sharp eyes creeping all over his body, probing him, searching for what he had found at the Prospect. Nonsense! Of course Hunter couldn’t have seen anything, he was too far away at that moment. He’d probably simply sensed the change in Homer’s mood and suspected him of something. But every time their gazes met, the old man broke out in a sweat. The little bit he had managed to read in the notepad was more than enough to make him feel doubts about the brigadier.
It was a diary.
Some of the pages were stuck together with dried blood and Homer didn’t touch them: he was afraid of tearing them with his stiff, tense fingers. The entries on the first pages were incoherent – the author couldn’t even keep his letters under control, and his thoughts galloped in a way that made it impossible to keep up with them.
‘We got through Nagornaya with no losses,’ the diary stated, and then immediately skipped on: ‘Tula is in chaos. There’s no way out to the Metro, Hansa is blocking it. We can’t go back home.’
Homer leafed forward a bit, watching out of the corner of his eye as the brigadier came down off his grave mound and walked towards him. The old man realised that Hunter mustn’t be allowed to get his hands on the diary. But just before he thrust the notepad into his knapsack, Homer managed to read: ‘We have brought the situation under control and appointed a commandant . . .’ And then immediately: ‘Who’ll be the next to die?’
And another thing: framed in a little square above the dangling question was a date. From the withered state of the notepad’s pages, anyone would have thought the events described in the diary must be at least a decade old, but the figures indicated that the entry had been made only a few days ago.
With long-forgotten agility, the old man’s ossifying brain fitted together the scattered pieces of the mosaic: the mysterious wanderer seen by the miserable tramp at Nagatino, the guard’s voice that seemed familiar at the hermetic door, the words ‘We can’t go back home . . .’ A complete picture began taking shape in front of his eyes. Maybe the scribble on the stuck-together pages could fill in the meaning of all the other strange events?
What was absolutely certain was that Tula had not been captured by bandits; something far more complicated and mysterious was going on there. And Hunter had spent a quarter of an hour questioning the sentries at the gates of the station – so he knew that just as well as Homer did.
That was precisely why Homer must not show him the notepad.
And it was why Homer dared to oppose him openly at the meeting in Istomin’s office.
‘We can’t do that,’ he said.
Hunter turned his head in Homer’s direction as slowly as a battleship training its main gun on the target. Istomin shifted his chair backwards, then decided to come out from behind his desk anyway. The colonel screwed his face up wearily.
‘We can’t blow up the hermetic door, there’s ground water all around, the line would be flooded instantly. The whole of Tula Station is held together by no more than a lick and a promise, they’re always praying it won’t spring a leak anywhere. And the parallel tunnel, you know yourselves . . . It’s ten years since . . .’ Homer went on.
‘So do we just knock and wait for them to open up?’ Denis Mikhailovich enquired.
‘Well, there’s always the bypass route,’ Istomin reminded him.
Astounded by that suggestion, the colonel started coughing violently and furiously accusing his superior of wanting to cripple and kill his best men. And then the brigadier fired a broadside.
‘Tula has to be cleaned out. The situation requires the extermination of everyone there. Not one of your men is left. They’ve all been finished off. If you don’t want to suffer any more losses, it’s the only possible decision. I know what I’m talking about. I have information.’
The final words were clearly intended for Homer. They made the old man feel like a naughty little puppy dog being shaken by the scruff of the neck to bring him to his senses.
‘Well, since the tunnel is sealed on our side,’ said Istomin, tugging down his tunic, ‘there is only one way to get into Tula. From the other side, through Hansa. But we can’t take armed men through that way, it’s out of the question.’
‘I’ll find men,’ Hunter said dismissively, and the colonel started.
‘Just to get to Hansa, you have to go through two stretches of tunnel on the Kakhovka Line as far as Kashira Station.’
‘What of it?’ asked the brigadier, crossing his arms on his chest.
‘In the region of Kashira the background radiation shoots off the scale,’ the colonel explained. ‘A fragment of a warhead fell nearby. It didn’t explode, but it’s quite bad enough as it is. Every second man who gets a dose of it dies within a month. Even now.’
An ominous silence fell. Homer took advantage of the hitch to initiate a furtive withdrawal – tactical, of course – from Istomin’s office. Eventually, Vladimir Ivanovich, apparently afraid that the uncontrollable brigadier would go off to demolish the hermetic door at Tula anyway, made a confession.
‘We have protective suits. But only two. You can take the most able-bodied soldier you can find, anyone. We’ll wait . . .’ He glanced round at Denis Mikhailovich. ‘What else can we do?’
‘Let’s go over to the lads,’ the colonel said with a sigh. ‘We’ll have a talk with them and you can choose yourself a partner.’
‘No need,’ said Hunter, with a shake of his head. ‘Homer’s the one I want.’
CHAPTER 7
The Voyage
As the trolley passed through the long section of tunnel marked with bright-yellow paint on the floor and walls, the helmsman couldn’t pretend any longer not to hear the radiation dosimeter clicking faster and faster. He took hold of the brake and muttered apologetically.
‘Comrade Colonel, we can’t go any further without protection.’
‘Let’s go just another hundred metres,’ Denis Mikhailovich suggested gently, turning to face him. ‘I’ll release you from watch duty for a week afterwards, as a hazard bonus.’
‘But this is the extreme limit, Comrade Colonel,’ the helmsman whined, still not daring to reduce speed.
‘Stop,’ Hunter ordered. ‘We’ll walk on from here. He’s quite right, the radiation level is really getting too high.’
The brake blocks squealed, the lantern hanging on the frame swayed, and the trolley came to a halt. The brigadier and the old man, who were sitting with their legs dangling over the edge, climbed down onto the tracks. The heavy protective suits, made of lead-impregnated fabric, looked like deep-sea divers’ outfits. They were incredibly expensive and rare – probably less than two dozen of them could be found in the entire Metro. The two at Sebastopol had almost never been used, they’d just been waiting for their time to come. These suits of armour could absorb the fiercest radiation, but they turned even simple walking into a difficult task – at least they did for Homer.
Denis Mikhailovich left the trolley and walked on with them for a few minutes, swapping phrases with Hunter – snatches of speech that were deliberately clipped and crumpled, so that Homer couldn’t unfold and interpret them.
‘Where will you get them?’ he asked the brigadier gruffly.
‘They’ll give me them. They won’t have any choice,’ Hunte
r boomed, looking straight ahead.
‘Everyone stopped expecting you back ages ago. For them you’re dead. Dead, you understand?’
Hunter stopped for a moment and spoke in a low voice, as if he were talking to himself, not the perimeter commander.
‘If only it was all that simple . . .’
‘And desertion from the Order – that means a fate worse than death.’
Without answering, the brigadier swung his hand up, simultaneously saluting the colonel and lopping off an invisible anchor cable. Denis Mikhailovich took the hint and stayed behind on the dockside while the brigadier and the old man moved slowly away from the shore, as if they were fighting a reverse current, and set off on their great voyage across the seas of darkness.
The colonel lowered his hand from his temple and signalled to the helmsman to start the engine. He felt desolate, left with no one to issue ultimatums to and no one to wage battle against. As the military commander of an island lost in one of those dark seas, all he could hope for now was that the little expedition wouldn’t get lost out there and would return home some day – from the other side, proving in its own small way that the world really was round.
The final guard post, located in the stretch of tunnel immediately after Kakhovka, had been almost deserted. For as long as the old man could remember, no one had ever attacked Sebastopol from the east.
Now the patch of yellow seemed less like a marker, dividing the endless concrete intestine into arbitrary sections, than a cosmic lift, connecting two planets that were hundreds of light years apart. Beyond it, the inhabitable space of Earth was imperceptibly replaced by a dead lunar landscape, and the apparent resemblance between them was a deception.
As he focused on setting one foot in front of the other in his incredibly heavy boots and listened to his own strenuous breathing, penned into a complex system of fluted tubes and filters, Homer imagined he was an astronaut who had landed on a satellite of some distant star. Indulging in this puerile fantasy made it easier for him to adjust to the weight of his suit – he could explain that by the high gravity – as well as the fact that they would be the only living creatures in the tunnels for kilometres ahead.
All the scientists and science-fiction writers never got their forecasts of the future right, thought the old man. By the year 2034 the human race should have been master of half the galaxy, or at least the solar system, for a long time already – Homer had been promised that when he was a child. But the science-fiction writers and the scientists had both started from the premise that humanity was rational and consistent. As if it didn’t consist of several billions of lazy, frivolous individuals who were easily distracted, but was some kind of beehive, endowed with collective reason and a unified will. As if, when it set about conquering space, it had really intended to take the task seriously and not abandon it halfway when the game got boring, turning its attention to electronics and then moving on to biotechnology, without ever achieving any really impressive results in anything. Except, perhaps, for nuclear physics.
So here he was, a wingless astronaut, a nonviable life-form without his cumbersome protective suit, an alien on his own planet, exploring and conquering the tunnels from Kakhovka to Kashira. And he and all the other survivors could simply forget about anything more ambitious than that.
It was strange: here, beyond the yellow marker, his body groaned under the fifty per cent increase in the force of gravity, but his soul was soaring, weightless. The day before, when he said goodbye to Elena before the expedition to Tula, he was still counting on coming back. But when Hunter named Homer again, choosing him as his partner for the second time in a row, the old man had realised there was no way he could weasel out of it. His insistent prayers to be tested and enlightened had finally been heard, and trying to back out now would be stupid and unmanly. He couldn’t treat his life’s work as a part-time job. It was pointless to play coy with destiny, promising to devote himself to his work wholeheartedly a bit later on, the next time around . . . There might not be any next time, and if he didn’t set his mind to it now, what would he carry on living for afterwards? To end his days as the unknown Nikolai Ivanovich, a local crackpot, a drooling old storyteller with an erratic smile? But to make the transition from a grotesque caricature of Homer to the genuine article, from an obsessive fantasist to a maker of myths, to rise out of the ashes renewed, first he would have to cremate his former self. He realised that if he carried on doubting and started pandering to his yearning for a home and a woman, if he constantly looked back, he was certain to miss something very important up ahead. He had to wield the knife.
It would be difficult for him to return from this new expedition unharmed, or even to return at all. And though he felt terribly sorry for Elena, who couldn’t believe at first that Homer had reappeared at the station alive and well after only one day away, and then cried when she failed to change his mind and saw him off again into oblivion, this time he hadn’t promised her anything. As he hugged Elena tight against him, he looked over her shoulder at the clock. He had to go. Homer knew it wasn’t easy to amputate more than ten years of life just like that, he was bound to suffer phantom pains after the loss. He had expected to feel the urge to look round all the time, but once he stepped beyond that thick yellow boundary marker, it was as if he had really died, and his soul had soared free, breaking out of both of its ponderous, unwieldy, physical shells. He had escaped.
Hunter didn’t seem to be hampered at all by his protective suit. The loose clothing bulked out his muscular, wolfish figure, transforming it into an amorphous colossus, but without reducing its agility. He walked along side by side with the panting old man, but only because he was still keeping a close eye on him after Nakhimov Prospect.
After what Homer had seen at Nagatino, Nagornaya and Tula, agreeing to carry on roaming the tunnels with Hunter hadn’t been an easy decision. But he had found a way to convince himself: the long-awaited metamorphoses heralding his rebirth had begun while he was with the brigadier. And it didn’t matter why Hunter had dragged him along again – to set the old man on the right path or to use him for spare rations. The most important thing for Homer now was not to let this new condition slip away, to exploit it while he still could, to invent things and write them down.
And another thing. When Hunter asked him to come, Homer seemed to sense that the brigadier needed him in almost exactly the same way – not in order to guide him through the tunnels and warn him about the dangers. Perhaps in nourishing the old man’s energies, the brigadier was also taking something from Homer, without asking permission. But what could he possibly need?
Hunter’s apparent lack of emotion could no longer deceive the old man. Under the crust of that paralysed face, magma was seething, occasionally splashing out through the craters of those smouldering eyes that didn’t close. He was in turmoil. He was searching for something too.
Hunter seemed to fit the role of the future book’s epic hero. Homer had hesitated for a while and then, after the first few trials, accepted him. But there were many things about the brigadier’s character, such as his passion for killing living things, the words he left unspoken, and his miserly gestures, that made the old man wary. Hunter was like those killers who taunted and provoked the police detectives, wanting to be unmasked. Homer didn’t know if Hunter saw him as a confessor, a biographer or an organ donor, but he sensed that this strange relationship of dependence was developing into something mutual, growing stronger than fear. And Homer was haunted by the feeling that Hunter was putting off a very important conversation. Sometimes the brigadier turned to him as if he was about to ask something, and never actually spoke. But then, perhaps the old man was merely indulging in wishful thinking and Hunter was leading him on deeper into the tunnels so that he could wring an unwanted witness’s neck. More and more often the brigadier’s eyes turned to probe the old man’s knapsack, with the fateful diary lying in the bottom of it. He couldn’t see it, but he seemed to guess that some object hidden i
n the knapsack attracted Homer’s thoughts like a magnet, and he was tracking those thoughts, gradually closing in on the notepad. The old man tried not to think about the diary, but it was futile.
There had been almost no time to pack for the journey, and Homer had only been able to hide away with the diary for a few minutes, not long enough to moisten and unstick the pages fused together with blood. But the old man had leafed rapidly through the other pages, criss-crossed haphazardly with hasty, fragmentary entries. The timeline was disrupted, as if the writer had to struggle to catch the words and had simply set them down on paper wherever he could. To render them meaningful, the old man had to arrange them in the right order.
‘We have no lines of communication. The phone is dead. Perhaps it’s sabotage. One of the exiles, in revenge? Before we got here.’
‘The situation is hopeless. We can’t expect help from anywhere. If we ask Sebastopol, we’ll be condemning our own men. We have to endure it . . . For how long?’
‘They won’t let me go . . . They’ve gone insane. If not me, then who? Make a run for it!’
And there was something else too. Immediately after the final entry, calling for the idea of storming Tula to be abandoned, there was a blurred signature, sealed with a bloody fingerprint, like reddish-brown sealing wax. It was a name that Homer had heard before, one he had often spoken himself. The diary belonged to the signal officer of the team sent to Tula a week before.
They passed the opening of a track leading to an engine depot, which would certainly have been plundered, if not for the intense radiation here. For some reason the black, wilted branch line leading to it had been screened off by someone with sections of steel reinforcement bars, welded together rather clumsily and very clearly in a hurry. A metal plate attached to the bars with wire bore a grinning skull and the remains of a warning written in red paint, but it had either faded with time or been scraped off. Homer’s gaze drew him past the barred entrance, deep into this dark well, and he barely managed to scramble back out. The line probably hadn’t always been as empty of life as they believed at Sebastopol, he thought to himself.