Аркадий Стругацкий - The Inhabited Island

Maxim opened the hatch a little way, stuck his head out, and apprehensively glanced at the sky. The sky was low and solid-looking, without that frivolous transparency that hints at the unfathomable depth of the cosmos and a multitude of inhabited worlds; it was a genuine biblical firmament, smooth and impervious. And this firmament, which no doubt rested on the mighty shoulders of some local Atlas, was lit by an even phosphorescent glow. Maxim searched at its zenith for the hole punched through it by his ship, but there wasn’t any hole, only two large black blots, spreading out like drops of ink in water. Maxim swung the hatch all the way open and jumped down into the tall, dry grass.

The air was hot and thick, with a smell of dust, old iron, crushed vegetation, and life. There was also a smell of death, ancient and incomprehensible. The grass came up to his waist, and there were dark thickets of bushes close by, with dismal, crooked trees haphazardly jutting up out of them. It was almost light, like a bright, moonlit night on Earth, only without any moonlight shadows and without any of that bluish moonlight haze; everything was gray, dusty, and flat. His ship was standing at the bottom of an immense depression with gently sloping sides. The terrain around the ship rose noticeably toward an indistinct horizon. And this was strange, because nearby a river, a large, calm river, flowed to the west, uphill across the slope of the depression.

Maxim walked around the ship, running his hand over its cold, slightly damp flank. He found traces of impacts where he was expecting them. A deep, nasty-looking dent below the indicator ring—that was when the ship suddenly jerked and flipped over onto its side and the cyberpilot took offense, so that Maxim had to hastily override the controls. And there was a notch beside the right visual sensor iris—that was ten seconds later, when the ship was set on its nose and went blind in one eye. Maxim looked up at the zenith of the sky again. The black blots were barely even visible now. A meteorite strike in the stratosphere; probability zero point zero zero… But every possible event occurred at some time or other, didn’t it?

Maxim stuck his head back into the cabin, set the controls to self-repair, activated the express laboratory, and walked toward the river. This is an adventure, of course, but it’s still just routine. Boring. For us in the FSG, even adventures are routine. A meteorite strike, a radiation strike, an accident on landing. An accident on landing, a meteorite strike, a radiation strike… Adventures of the body.

The tall, brittle grass rustled and crunched under his feet, and the prickly seeds clung to his shorts. A cloud of some kind of midges flew at him, whining and droning, jostled about right in front of his face, and then left him alone. Serious, grown-up people don’t join the Free Search Group. They have their own serious, grown-up business to deal with, and they know that all these alien planets are essentially tiresome and humdrum. Tiresomely humdrum. Humdrumly tiresome. But, of course, if you’re twenty years old, if you don’t really know how to do anything much, if you don’t really know what you would like to do, if you still haven’t learned to appreciate the most important thing that you possess—time—and if you don’t have any special talents or the prospect of acquiring any, if the impulse that dominates your entire being at the age of twenty still emanates, as it did ten years ago, not from your head but from your hands and feet, if you are still primitive enough to imagine that on unknown planets you can discover some precious object or other that is quite impossible on Earth, if, if, if… Well then, of course—take the catalog, open it at any page, jab your finger at any line, and go flying off. Discover a planet, give it your own name, and determine its physical characteristics; do battle with monsters, if any such should be found there; establish contact, should there be anyone with whom to do so; or play Robinson Crusoe for a while, should you not discover anyone…

And it’s not as if all this is pointless. They’ll thank you and tell you that you have contributed to the best of your ability, and they’ll summon you for a detailed discussion with an eminent specialist… Schoolchildren, especially the backward ones, and definitely those in the youngest classes, will regard you with respect, but when you meet your Teacher, he will merely inquire, So you’re still in the FSG, then? He’ll change the subject, and his expression will be guilty and sad, because he blames himself for the fact that you’re still in the FSG, and your father will say, Hmm… and hesitantly offer you a job as a lab technician, and your mother will say, Maxie, but you used to draw really well as a child , and Oleg will say, How much longer? Stop disgracing yourself like this , and Jenny will say, Let me introduce you to my husband . And they’ll be right, everyone will be right, apart from you. And you’ll go back to the FSG central office and there, trying hard not to look at the other two blockheads just like you who are rummaging through the catalogs on the next set of shelves, you’ll take down yet another volume, open it at random to any page, and jab your finger at it…

Before walking down the ridge to the river, Maxim looked around. Behind him the grass he had trampled down was straightening out, raggedly jutting back up, the crooked trees were black silhouettes against the background of the sky, and the open hatch was a bright little circle. Everything was very normal. Well, OK, he said to himself. So be it… It would be good to find a civilization—powerful, ancient, and wise. And human… He went down to the water.

The river really was large and slow, and to the naked eye it clearly appeared to flow down from the east and up toward the west (however, the refraction here was horrendous). It was also obvious that the opposite bank was shallow and overgrown with thick rushes, and a half mile upstream Maxim could see some kinds of columns and crooked beams jutting up out of the water and a twisted latticework of girders, entangled in shaggy, creeping plants. Civilization, Maxim thought without any particular enthusiasm. He could sense a lot of iron on all sides, and something else as well, something very unpleasant and asphyxiating; when he scooped up a handful of water, he realized that it was radiation, rather strong and pernicious. The river was carrying along radioactive substances from the east, and that made it clear to Maxim that there was little to be gained from this civilization, that once again this was not what was required. It would be best not to establish contact; he should just carry out the standard analyses, unobtrusively fly around the planet a couple of times, and clear out of here. And then, back on Earth, he would hand over his materials to the morose, worldly-wise gentlemen of the Galactic Security Council, and forget about all of this as quickly as possible.

He fastidiously shook his fingers and wiped them on the sand, then squatted down and started pondering. He tried to picture the inhabitants of this planet, which could hardly be thriving and trouble-free. Somewhere beyond the forests was a city, also unlikely to be thriving: dirty factories, decrepit reactors dumping radioactive gunk in the river; ugly, barbaric buildings with sheet-iron roofs, large expanses of wall, and not many windows; dirty gaps between the buildings, piled high with refuse and the corpses of domestic pets; a large moat around the city, with drawbridges over it… but, no, that was before reactors. And the people: he tried to picture the people, but he couldn’t. He only knew that they were wearing a lot of clothes, that they were densely packed into thick, coarse material and had high, white collars that rubbed their chins sore… Then he saw the tracks in the sand.