Аркадий Стругацкий - The Inhabited Island

It suddenly occurred to Maxim that this area was so neglected and wild, there might not be any people nearby, and it might take him several days and nights to reach them. Maxim’s primeval instincts were roused once again, but he could sense that he was surrounded by plenty of live meat here and he wouldn’t starve to death, that it probably wouldn’t all taste great but it would be interesting to do a bit of hunting anyway. And since he was forbidden to think about the really important things, he started remembering how he and Oleg used to go hunting with the park ranger Adolph, with just their bare hands, cunning against cunning, reason against instinct, strength against strength, three days and nights at a stretch, chasing a deer through tangled, fallen trees, catching it, grabbing it by the horns, and tumbling it over onto the ground… Maybe there weren’t any deer here, but there was no reason to doubt that the local game was edible; the moment he started pondering and got distracted, the gnats started ferociously devouring him, and everyone knew that you wouldn’t starve to death on an alien planet if you yourself were edible there.

It would be fun to lose my way here and spend a year or two roaming through the forest. I could acquire a companion—some kind of wolf or bear—and we’d go hunting together and talk… only I’d get bored eventually, of course. And then, it doesn’t look like I could get any pleasure out of wandering through these woods; there’s too much iron everywhere, there’s nothing to breathe… And anyway, first of all I have to assemble a null-transmitter…

Maxim stopped and listened. He could hear a hollow, monotonous booming from somewhere deep in the forest thickets, and he realized that he had been hearing this booming for a long time already but had only just noticed it. It wasn’t an animal and it wasn’t a waterfall—it was a mechanism, some kind of barbaric machine. It was snorting, bellowing, grating metal on metal, and scattering hideous, rusty smells. And it was getting closer.

Maxim crouched down and ran toward it without making a sound, sticking close to the side of the road, and abruptly stopped when he almost went darting out into an intersection. The road was intersected at right angles by another highway, a very muddy one, with deep, ugly ruts, and fragments of concrete slabs jutting up out of it. It was foul smelling and very, very radioactive. Maxim squatted down on his haunches and looked to his left, the direction from which the roaring of an engine and metallic rasping sounds were advancing. The ground under his feet began shuddering. It was getting even closer.

A minute later it appeared—nonsensically huge, hot, and stinking, made completely out of riveted metal, smashing down the road with its monstrous caterpillar tracks caked in mud. It didn’t hurtle or trundle along, it barged its way forward, slovenly and hunchbacked, jangling sheets of iron that had come loose, stuffed full of raw plutonium and lanthanides. Moronic and menacing, with no human presence in it, mindless and dangerous, it lumbered across the intersection and went barging on, smashing the concrete, setting it crunching and squealing, and leaving behind a trail of incandescent, sweltering air as it disappeared into the forest, still lumbering and growling, until it moved away into the distance and gradually grew quieter.

Maxim caught his breath and brushed off the midges. He was astounded. He had never seen anything so absurd and preposterous in his entire life. Yes, he thought. I won’t get hold of any positron emitters here. As he watched the receding monster, he suddenly noticed that the intersecting road was not simply a road but also a kind of firebreak, a narrow gap cut through the forest: the trees didn’t cover the sky above it as they did above the first road. Maybe he ought to chase after the monster, he thought. Overtake it, stop it, and extinguish the reactor…

He listened closely; the forest was full of clamor, and the monster was wallowing about in the thickets, like a hippopotamus in a quagmire. Then the roaring of the engine started moving closer again. It was coming back. The same wheezing and growling, a surging wave of stench, clanging and rattling, and then it lumbered across the intersection again and barged back toward where it had just come from… No, said Maxim. I don’t want to get involved with it. I don’t like malicious animals and barbaric automatons. He waited for the monster to disappear from sight, walked out of the bushes, got a running start, and flew across the ripped-up, polluted intersection in a single leap.

For a while he walked very quickly, taking deep breaths in order to clear the iron behemoth’s fumes out of his lungs, and then switched back to his hiking stride. He thought about what he had seen during the first two hours of life on his inhabited island and tried to assemble all these incongruous, chance events into a whole that was logically consistent. However, it was too difficult. The picture that emerged was fantastical, not real. This forest, stuffed full of old iron, was fantastical, and in it fantastical creatures called to each other in voices that were almost human. Just like in a fairy tale, an old, abandoned road led to an enchanted castle, and invisible, wicked sorcerers tried their damnedest to make life difficult for anyone who had ended up in this country. On the distant approaches, they had pelted him with meteorites, but that didn’t work, so then they had burned his ship, thereby trapping their victim, and then sent out an iron dragon to get him. However, the dragon had proved to be too old and stupid, and by now they had probably realized their blunder and were preparing something a bit more modern.

Listen, Maxim told them. After all, I’m not planning to disenchant any enchanted castles and awaken your lethargic beauties. All I want is to meet one of you who is pretty bright and will help me with finding some positron emitters.

But the wicked sorcerers dug in their heels. First they set a huge, rotten tree across the roadway, then they demolished the concrete surface, dug a large pit in the ground, and filled it with rank-smelling radioactive slurry, and when even that didn’t help, when the gnats grew disillusioned with biting him and abandoned him, as morning approached the sorcerers released a cold, wicked mist from out of the forest. The mist gave Maxim chilly shivers, and he set off at a run in order to warm himself up. The mist was viscous and oily, with a smell of wet metal and putrefaction, but soon it started smelling of smoke, and Maxim realized that a fire was burning somewhere nearby.

Dawn was breaking, and the sky was already almost bright with the grayness of morning, when Maxim saw the campfire at the side of the road, by a low, moss-covered stone structure with a collapsed roof and empty, black windows. Maxim couldn’t see any people, but he could sense that they were somewhere nearby, that they had been here just recently and perhaps they would soon come back. He turned off the road, jumped across the roadside ditch, and set off, sinking up to his ankles in rotting leaves, toward the fire.

The campfire greeted him with its benign, primeval warmth, pleasantly agitating his slumbering instincts. Everything here was simple. Without having to greet anyone, he could squat down, reach out his hands to the flames, and wait, without saying anything, until the equally taciturn owner of the campfire handed him a hot dollop of food and a hot mug. Of course, the owner wasn’t there, but a smoke-blackened cooking pot containing a pungent-smelling concoction was hanging above the campfire, and two loose coveralls of coarse material were lying a little distance away, beside a dirty, half-empty bag with shoulder straps that contained huge, dented tin mugs and some other metal objects with indeterminate functions.