Boris Strugatsky - Noon - 22nd Century

The hilltop smelled of hot smoke plus something unfamiliar and acrid. Sidorov stopped on the edge of an enormous pit with perpendicular edges. In the pit a nearly finished dome—the airtight dome for six people, with hall and oxygen filtration—was lying on its side. Molten slag glimmered in the pit. Against this background he could see the torn-off hemomechanical tentacles of the embryo waving weakly and helplessly. Out of the pit came hot acrid smells.

“What can the matter be?” Sorochinsky asked in a whining voice.

Sidorov raised his head and saw Sorochinsky on hands and knees at the very edge of the crater.

“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down,” Sorochinsky said mournfully. “I’ll huff, and I’ll—”

“Shut up,” Sidorov said quietly. He sat down on the edge of the pit and started to work his way down.

“Don’t,” said Galtsev. “It’s dangerous.”

“Shut up,” Sidorov repeated. He had to find out fast what had happened here. The developmental work on the Egg, the most perfect machine created by human beings, could not be interfered with. It was the most perfect machine, the most intelligent machine…

The intense heat singed his face. Sidorov squinted and crawled down past the red-hot edge of the newborn dome. He looked around below. He caught sight of fallen concrete arches, rusty blackened reinforcement bars, a broad dark passageway which led somewhere into the depths of the knoll. Something turned ponderously underfoot. Sidorov bent over. He did not at once realize what this gray metal stump was, but when he did, he understood everything. It was an artillery shell.

The knoll was hollow. Two hundred years ago some bunch of bastards had built a dark, concrete-lined chamber inside it. They had stuffed this chamber full of artillery shells. The mechanism erecting the supporting piles for the dome had broken into the vault. The crumbling concrete had not been able to bear the weight of the dome. The piles had slipped into it as if into quicksand. Then the machine had started flooding the concrete with molten lithoplast. The poor embryomech could not know that there was an ammunition dump here. It couldn’t even know what an artillery shell was, because the people who had given life to its program had themselves forgotten what artillery shells were. It seemed that the shells were charged with TNT. The TNT had degraded over two hundred years, but not completely. Not in all the shells. And all of them that could explode, had started exploding. And the mechanism had been turned into a junkheap.

Pebbles showered down from above. Sidorov looked up and saw Galtsev descending toward him. Sorochinsky was coming down the opposite wall.

“Where are you going?” Sidorov asked.

Sorochinsky answered in a small voice, “We want to help, sir.”

“I don’t need help.”

“We only…” Sorochinsky began, and hesitated.

A crack opened up along the wall behind Sidorov.

“Look out!” yelled Sorochinsky.

Sidorov stepped to the side, tripped over the shell, and fell. He landed face down and immediately turned over on his back. The dome rocked, and ponderously collapsed, burying its scorching-hot edge deep into the black ground. The ground trembled. Hot air lashed Sidorov’s face.

A white haze hung over the knoll, where the dome, sticking up out of the crater, shone dimly. Something was still smouldering there, and from time to time it gave off muffled crackling sounds. Galtsev, his eyes red, was sitting with his arms around his knees, looking at the knoll too. His arms were wound with bandages and the entire left half of his face was black with dirt and soot. He had not yet washed it off, although the sun had risen long ago. Sorochinsky was sleeping by the campfire, the suede jacket covering his head.

Sidorov lay down on his back and placed his hands under his head. He didn’t want to look at the knoll, at the white haze, at Galtsev’s fierce-looking face. It was very pleasant lying there and staring into the blue, blue sky. You could look into that sky for hours. He had known that when he was an Assaultman, when he had jumped for the north pole of Vladislava, when he had stormed Belinda, when he had sat alone in a smashed boat on Transpluto. There was no sky at all there, just a black starry void and one blinding star—the Sun. He had thought then that he would give the last minutes of his life if only he could see a blue sky once more. On Earth that feeling had quickly been forgotten. It had been that way even before, when for years at a time he had not seen blue sky, and each second of those years could have been his last. But it did not befit an Assaultman to think about death. Though on the other hand you had to think a lot about possible defeats. Gorbovsky had once said that death is worse than any defeat, even the most shattering. Defeat was always really only an accident, a setback which you could surmount. You had to surmount it. Only the dead couldn’t fight on. But no, the dead could fight on, and even inflict a defeat.

Sidorov lifted himself up a little and looked at Galtsev, and wanted to ask him what he thought about all this. Galtsev had also been an Assaultman. True, he had been a bad Assaultman. And probably he thought that there was nothing in the world worse than defeat.

Galtsev turned his head slowly, moved his lips, and said suddenly, “Your eyes are red, sir.”

“Yours too,” said Sidorov. He should get in touch with Fischer and tell him everything that had happened. He got up and, walking slowly over the grass, headed for the pterocar. He walked with his head back, and looked at the sky. You could stare at the sky for hours—it was so blue and so astonishingly beautiful. The sky you came back to be under.

Aleksandr Kostylin stood in front of his enormous desk and examined the slick, glossy photographs.

“Hello, Lin,” the Hunter said to him.

Kostylin raised a high-browed bald head and shouted in English, “Ah! Home is the sailor, home from the sea!”

“And the hunter home from the hill,” the Hunter finished. They hugged each other.

“What have you got to delight me this time?” Kostylin asked in a businesslike tone. “Are you in from Yaila?”

“Right. Straight from the Thousand Swamps.” The Hunter sat down in an armchair and stretched out his legs. “And you’re getting fatter and balder, Lin. Sedentary life will be the death of you. Next time I’ll take you with me.”

Kostylin touched his potbelly worriedly. “Yes,” he said. “Terrible. Getting old and fat. The old soldiers are fading away. So, did you bring me anything interesting?”

“Not really, Lin. Nothing much. Ten two-headed snakes, a few new species of polyvalved mollusks. What have you got there?” He reached out a hand and took the packet of photographs from the desk.

“Some greenhorn brought that in. You know him?”

“No.” The Hunter examined the photographs. “Not bad. It’s Pandora, of course.”

“Right. Pandora. The giant crayspider. A very large specimen.”

“Yes,” said the Hunter, looking at the ultrasonic carbine propped for scale against the bare yellow paunch of the cray-spider. “A pretty good specimen for a beginner. But I’ve seen bigger. How many times did he fire?”

“He says twice. Hit the main nerve center both times.”

“He should have fired an anesthetic needle. The lad got a little riled up.” With a smile, the Hunter examined the photograph where the excited greenhorn trampled the dead monster. “Well, okay. How are things with you at home?”

Kostylin waved a hand. “Chock full of matrimony. All the girls are getting married. Marta got hitched to a hydrologist.”