Аркадий Стругацкий - The Inhabited Island

“Yes, sir,” Zef replied after a pause.

The cornet started striding around the office. “Could you not perhaps… uhhh … how can I put it… formulate your opinion concerning the individual in question? Professionally, if I might express myself in that way.”

“I couldn’t really say,” said Zef. “Under the terms of my sentence, I have no right to act in a professional capacity.”

“I understand,” said the cornet. “That’s quite correct. I commend you. Buuut …”

Zef stood there at attention, with his blue eyes open wide. But the cornet was clearly experiencing a certain degree of discomfiture. Gai understood him very well. This was an important incident, of national significance. (What if this savage turned out to be a spy after all?) And HQ medical officer Zogu was a fine guardsman, of course, a brilliant guardsman, but he was only the HQ medical officer. Whereas the ginger roughneck Zef, before he became involved in criminal activities, had been very good at his job and was actually a great celebrity. But it was possible to understand him too. For, after all, everyone, even a criminal, even a criminal who has acknowledged his crime, wants to live. And the law was ruthless with regard to those already condemned to death: the slightest violation meant execution. On the spot. It was the only way; in times like these, leniency turned out to be cruelty and the only true leniency lay in cruelty. The law was ruthless but wise.

“Well then,” said the cornet. “There’s nothing to be done… But, speaking strictly personally—do you really think he’s insane?”

Zef hesitated again. “Speaking strictly personally?” he repeated. “Well, of course, in speaking strictly personally, a man is inherently inclined to make mistakes… Well then, speaking strictly personally, I am inclined to regard this as a clear case of dissociated personality, with displacement and replacement of the genuine ego by an imaginary one. And, speaking strictly personally, on the basis of my own experience of life, I would recommend electroshock and phleoferous medication.”

Corporal Varibobu stealthily noted all of this down, but the cornet couldn’t be fooled that easily. He took the sheet of paper with the notes from the corporal and stuck it in the pocket of his field jacket. Mah-sim started talking again, addressing the cornet and Zef by turns—there was something he wanted, the poor fellow, something that he thought wasn’t right—but at that point the door opened and the HQ medical officer walked in, apparently having been torn away from his lunch.

“Greetings, To’ot,” he sullenly declared. “What’s the problem? I see that you are alive and well, and that is some comfort to me. But who is this character?”

“The educatees caught him in the forest,” the cornet explained. “I suspect that he’s insane.”

“He’s a malingerer, not a madman,” the medical officer growled, pouring himself a glass of water from the carafe. “Send him back into the forest and let him work.”

“He’s not one of ours,” the cornet objected. “And we don’t know where he came from. I think the degenerates must have captured him at some time; he went crazy while he was with them and defected to us.”

“That’s right,” the medic growled. “You’d have to be crazy to defect to us.” He walked over to the detainee and immediately reached out to grab hold of his eyelids. The detainee gave a spine-chilling grin and gently pushed him away. “Hey, hey!” said the medical officer, deftly grabbing hold of his ear. “You just stand still, my fine stallion!”

The detainee yielded. The medic turned back his eyelids, palpated his neck and throat while whistling to himself, bent the detainee’s arms and straightened them out again, leaned down and struck him below the knees, then went back to the carafe and drank another glass of water.

“Heartburn,” he announced.

Gai looked at Zef. The ginger-bearded man was standing off to one side, with his gun set beside his legs, gazing at the wall with emphatic indifference. The medical officer drank his fill and went back to the freak. He felt him and tapped him all over, looked at his teeth, punched him twice in the stomach, and then took a little flat box out of his pocket, unwound a wire, plugged it into a socket, and started applying the little box to various parts of the savage’s body.

“Right,” he said, coiling up the wire. “And he’s mute too, is he?”

“No,” said the cornet. “He talks, but in some kind of bear’s language. He only uses our words sometimes, and even then they’re distorted. He doesn’t understand us. And these are his drawings.”

The HQ medic looked at the drawings. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Amusing.” He grabbed the corporal’s pen and rapidly drew a cat on one of the forms, the way that children draw cats, all sticks and circles. “What do you say to this, my friend?” he asked, handing the drawing to the freak.

Without pondering for even a second, the freak started scratching away with the pen, and a strange animal, with a thick coat of fur and a heavy, menacing look in its eyes, appeared beside the cat. Gai didn’t know any animal like that, but he did understand one thing: this was nothing like a child’s drawing. It was drawn really well—quite wonderfully, in fact. Just to look at it was frightening. The medical officer reached out his hand for the pen, but the freak moved back and drew a different animal, a totally bizarre one, with huge ears, wrinkly skin, and a thick tail instead of a nose.

“Wonderful!” the medic exclaimed, slapping his sides.

However, the freak didn’t stop at that. And what he went on to draw wasn’t an animal but clearly some kind of machine—it looked like a large, transparent shell. He deftly drew in a little figure sitting inside the shell, tapped his finger on the figure, then tapped himself on the chest with the same finger, and said, “ Mah-ssim .”

“He could have seen that thing by the river,” said Zef, who had walked up without being heard. “We burned something like that last night. But those monsters…” he shook his head.

The medical officer seemed to notice him for the first time. “Ah, professor!” he exclaimed with exaggerated delight. “So that’s it, I thought there was an odd stink in the office! Would you be so kind, dear colleague, as to pronounce your wise judgments from that corner over there? You would greatly oblige me…”

Varibobu giggled, and the cornet said in a severe voice, “Stand by the doors, Zef, and don’t forget yourself.”

“Well, all right,” the medic said. “What are you thinking of doing with him, To’ot?”

“That depends on your diagnosis, Zogu,” the cornet replied. “If he’s a malingerer, I’ll hand him over to the prosecutor’s office, and they’ll get to the bottom of things. But if he’s a madman—”

“He’s not a malingerer, To’ot,” the HQ medical officer said emphatically. “The prosecutor’s office is definitely not the place for him. But I know a place where they will be interested in him. Where’s the brigadier?”

“The brigadier is out on the highway.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter anyway. You’re the duty officer, aren’t you, To’ot? So you just dispatch this extremely curious individual to this address…” The medic propped himself against the barrier, shielding himself from everyone with his shoulders and elbows, and wrote something on the back of the last drawing.

“But what is this?” the cornet asked.

“This? It’s a certain department that will be grateful to you for your freak, To’ot. I warrant you that.”

The cornet uncertainly twirled the form in his hands, then walked over to the farthest corner of the office and beckoned the medic with his finger. They talked there for a while in low voices, so that only isolated phrases spoken by Mr. Zogu could be made out: “…The Department of Propaganda… Send him with a man you can trust… It’s not so very secret!… I warrant you… Order him to forget the matter… Damn it, why, a snot-nosed kid won’t understand anything anyway!…”