Arkady Strugatsky - The Snail on The Slope

(c) Copyright Arcady And Boris Strugatsky

(c) Copyright Translated from the Russian by Alan Meyers, 1980

Bantam Books, Inc., NY

Original: "Ulitka na sklone"

Chapter One

From this height, the forest was like foam, luxuriant and blotchy, a gigantic world-encompassing porous sponge, like an animal waiting in concealment, now fallen asleep and overgrown with rough moss. A formless mask hiding a face, as yet revealed to none.

Pepper shook off his sandals and sat down with his bare legs dangling over the precipice. It seemed to him that his heels at once became damp, as if he had actually immersed them in the warm lilac fog that lay banked up in the shadows under the cliff. He fished out the pebbles he had collected from his pocket and laid them out neatly beside him. He then selected the smallest and gently tossed it down into the living and silent, slumbering, all-enveloping indifference, and the white spark was extinguished, and nothing happened-no branch trembled, no eye half-opened to glance up.

If he were to throw a pebble every one and a half minutes, and if what the one-legged cook, nicknamed Pansy, said was true and what Madame Bardot, head of the Assistance to the Local Population Group, reckoned, if what driver Acey whispered to the unknown man from the Engineering Penetration Group was untrue, and if human intuition was worth anything at all, and if wishes came true once in a lifetime, then at the seventh stone, the bushes behind him would part with a crash, and the director would step out onto the soft crushed grass of the dew-gray clearing. He would be stripped to the waist in his gray garbardines with the lilac braid, breathing heavily, sleek and glossy, yellow-pink and shaggy, looking nowhere in particular, neither at the forest beneath him nor at the sky above him, bending down to bury his arms in the grass, then unbending to raise a breeze with his broad palms, each time the mighty fold on his belly bulging out over his trousers, while air, saturated with carbon dioxide and nicotine, would burst out of his open mouth with a whistling gurgle.

The bushes behind parted with a crash. Pepper looked around cautiously, but it wasn't the director, it was someone he knew, Claudius-Octavian Haus-botcher from the Eradication Group. He approached without haste and halted two paces away, looking Pepper up and down with his piercing dark eyes. He knew something or suspected something, something very important, and this knowledge or suspicion had frozen his long face, the stony face of a man who had brought here to the precipice a strange, alarming piece of news. No one in the whole world knew what this news was, but it was already clear that everything had altered decisively; what had gone before was no longer significant and now, at last, everyone would be required to contribute all he was capable of.

"And whose might these shoes be?" said he, glancing about him.

"They're not shoes, they're sandals," said Pepper. "Indeed?" Hausbotcher sneered and withdrew a large notepad from his pocket. "Sandals? Ver-ry good. But whose sandals are they?"

He edged toward the brink, peeped cautiously down and stepped back smartly.

"Man sits by the precipice," he said, "next to him, sandals. The question inevitably raises itself: whose sandals are they and where is their owner?" "They're my sandals," said Pepper. "Yours?" Hausbotcher looked doubtfully at the large notepad. "You're sitting barefooted, then? Why?"

"Barefoot because I've no choice," explained Pepper. "Yesterday I dropped my right shoe and decided from now on, I'll always sit barefoot." He bent down and looked between his splayed knees. "There she lies. I can just drop this pebble in. . "

Hausbotcher adroitly seized him by the arm and appropriated the pebble.

"It is indeed just a pebble," he said. "That, however, makes no difference as yet. Pepper, it's incomprehensible why you're lying to me. You can't possibly see the shoe from here-even if it's there, and whether it is or not is another question, which will be gone into later-and if you can't see the shoe, ergo you can't hit it with a stone, even if you possessed the necessary accuracy and actually did wish to do that and only that. I mean hitting... But we'll sort all that out presently." He hitched up his trousers and squatted down on his haunches.

"So you were here yesterday as well," he said. "Why? For what reason have you come a second time to the precipice, where the other Directorate personnel, not to mention temporary staff, only come to obey the call of nature?"

Pepper slumped. This is just plain ignorance, he thought. No, no, it's not a challenge, nor is it spite, no need to take it seriously. It's just ignorance. No need to take ignorance seriously. Ignorance excretes itself on the forest. Ignorance always excretes itself over something.

"You like sitting here, seemingly," Hausbotcher went on insinuatingly. "You like the forest a lot, seemingly. You love it, don't you? Answer me!" "Don't you?" asked Pepper.

"Don't you forget yourself," he said aggrieved and nipped open his notepad. "As you very well know, I belong to the Eradication Group and therefore your question, or rather your counterquestion is entirely devoid of meaning. You understand perfectly well that my attitude to the forest is defined by my professional duty; what defines your attitude to it is not clear to me. That's bad, Pepper, you need to think about that. I'm advising you for your own good, not for mine. You mustn't be so unintelligible. Sits on the edge of the cliff in bare feet, throwing pebbles... Why, one asks? In your place I'd tell me everything straight out. Get everything sorted out. Who knows, there could be extenuating circumstances. Nothing's threatening you anyway. Is it, Pepper?"

"No," said Pepper, "that is, of course, yes." "There you are. Simplicity disappears at once and never comes back. Whose hand? we ask. Whither the cast? Or, perhaps, to whom? Or, as it may be, at whom? And why? And how is it you can sit on the edge of the cliff? Is it inborn or have you done special training? I, for example, am unable to sit on the edge of the cliff, and I can't bear to think why I might train for such a thing. I get dizzy at the thought. That's only natural. Nobody needs to sit on the cliff edge. Especially if he doesn't have a permit to enter the forest. Show me your permit, if you please, Pepper." "I haven't got one." "So. Not got. Why is that?"

"I don't know... They won't give me one, that's all."

"That's right, not given out. This we know. And why don't they give you one? I've got one, he's got one, they've got one, plenty of people have them, but for some reason you don't get one."

Pepper stole a cautious glance at him. Hausbotcher's long emaciated nose was sniffing, his eyes constantly blinking.

"Probably it's because I'm an outsider," suggested Pepper. "Probably that's why."

"I'm not the only one taking an interest in you, you know," Hausbotcher confided. "If it were only me! People a bit higher up than me are taking an interest. Listen, Pepper, could you come away from the edge, so we can carry on. I get dizzy looking at you."

Pepper got up and began leaping about on one leg as he fastened his sandal.

"Oh dear, please come away from the edge!" cried Hausbotcher in agony, waving his notepad at Pepper.

"You'll be the death of me someday with your antics."

"That's it," said Pepper, stamping his foot. "I shan't do it again. Let's go, shall we?"

"Let's go," said Hausbotcher. "I assert, however, that you haven't answered a single one of my questions. You pain me, Pepper. Is this any way to go on?" He looked at the bulky notepad and placed it under his armpit with a shrug. "It's very odd, definitely no impressions, let alone information."