Arkady Strugatsky: The Doomed City

A vehicle stuck its nose out of a gateway on the left, up ahead of them. Donald flashed his lights at it and hurtled past, and the vehicle, another garbage truck, pulled out onto the road and tried to overtake them, but it had picked the wrong guys for that. There was no way it could compete with Donald -- its headlights glinted in through the rear window for a moment and then it dropped back, hopelessly outrun. They overtook another garbage truck in the Burnt Districts, and just in time, because the cobblestones started immediately after the Burnt Districts, and Donald was obliged to reduce speed anyway so the old rust bucket wouldn't fall apart.

Here they met trucks already going the other way, already empty -- they were coming back from the dump, no longer in any hurry to get anywhere. Then a shadowy figure detached itself from a streetlamp and walked out into the road, and Andrei slipped his hand under the seat and pulled out a heavy tire iron, but it turned out to be a policeman, who asked them to give him a lift to Cabbage Lane. Neither Andrei nor Donald knew where that was, and then the policeman, a beefy guy with big jowls and tangled locks of light-colored hair sticking out from under his uniform cap, said he would show them the way.

He stood on the running board beside Andrei, holding on to the door frame, twisting his nose about discontendedly the whole way, as if he'd caught a smell of something, God only knew what -- although he himself reeked of stale sweat, and Andrei remembered that this part of the city had already been disconnected from the water main.

For a while they drove in silence, with the policeman whistling something from an operetta, and then, right out of the blue, he informed them that just today, at midnight, on the corner of Cabbage Lane and Second Left Street, they'd bumped off some poor devil and pulled out all his gold teeth.

"You're not doing your job," Andrei told him angrily. Cases like this infuriated him, and the policeman's tone of voice made Andrei feel like punching him in the neck: it was immediately obvious that he couldn't care less about the murder, or the victim, or the killer.

The policeman swung his broad face around quizzically and asked, "So you'll teach me how to do my job, will you?"

"Maybe it could be me," said Andrei.

The policeman screwed his eyes up ill-naturedly, whistled, and said, "Teachers, teachers! Whichever way you spit -- teachers everywhere. He stands there and teaches. He's carting garbage already, but he's still teaching."

"I'm not trying to teach you -- " Andrei began, raising his voice, but the policeman wouldn't let him speak.

"I'll get back to the station now," he informed them calmly, "and I'll call your garage, and tell them your right sidelight isn't working. His sidelight isn't working -- got it? -- and on top of that, he's teaching the police how to do their job. Pipsqueak."

Donald suddenly burst into dry, grating laughter.

The policeman gave a hoot of laughter too and said in a perfectly amicable voice, "It's just me for forty buildings, OK? And they forbid us to carry guns. What do you want from us? They'll start knifing you at home soon, never mind the back alleys."

"So what are you doing about it?" Andrei said, stunned. "You should protest, demand -- "

"We have 'protested,'" the policeman echoed acidly. "We have 'demanded'...You're new here, are you? Hey, boss," he called to Donald. "Pull up. This is my stop."

He jumped down off the running board and, without looking back, waddled off toward a dark crack between the lopsided wooden houses, where a solitary streetlamp burned in the distance, with a little knot of people standing under it.

"Honest to God, are they total idiots, or what?" Andrei said indignantly when the truck started moving again. "How can they do that -- the city's full of riffraff, and the police are unarmed! It's absolutely crazy. Kensi's got a holster on his hip, what does he carry in it, cigarettes?"

"Sandwiches," said Donald. "'Due to an increase in the numbers of cases of criminals attacking police officers in order to seize their weapons...' and so forth."

Andrei ruminated for a while, bracing himself like grim death with his feet to avoid being thrown up off the seat. It was almost the end of the cobblestones already.

"I think it's incredibly stupid," he said eventually. "How about you?"

"I think so too," Donald responded, lighting up awkwardly with one hand.

"And you talk about it so calmly?"

"I've done all my worrying," said Donald. "It's a very old directive; you weren't even here yet."

Andrei scratched the back of his head and frowned. Well, dammit, maybe there was some sense in this directive. When all was said and done, a solitary policeman really was tempting bait for those creeps. If they took away the guns, then of course they had to take them away from everyone. And, of course, the problem wasn't that idiotic directive but the fact that there weren't very many police officers, and they didn't carry out very many raids -- but they ought to set up one grand raid and sweep all this filth away at a single stroke! Get the local people involved. Me, for instance, I'd be happy to go... Donald would go, of course... I'll have to write to the mayor.

Then his thoughts suddenly took a new turn. "Listen, Don," he said. "You're a sociologist. Of course, I don't reckon sociology is any kind of science at all -- I've told you that already -- it's got absolutely no method. But, of course, you know a lot, a lot more than I do. So you explain to me where all this dross in our city comes from. How did they get here -- the murderers, the rapists, the crooks? Didn't the Mentors realize who they were inviting here?"

"They realized, probably," Donald replied indifferently, shooting straight over a terrifying pit filled with black water without even pausing.

"But why then... ?"

"People aren't born thieves. They become thieves. And then, as everyone knows, 'How can we tell what the Experiment requires? The Experiment is the Experiment...'" Donald paused for a moment. "Soccer is soccer: a round ball, a square pitch, and may the best team win."

The streetlamps came to an end and the residential area of the city was left behind. Now the battered and broken road was flanked on both sides by abandoned ruins -- the remnants of incongruous colonnades that had slumped into shoddy foundations; walls propped up by girders, with gaping holes instead of windows; tall grass; stacks of rotting timber; thickets of nettles and thistles; stunted little trees, half choked by creepers, standing among heaps of blackened bricks. And then up ahead a hazy glow appeared again. Donald turned to the right, carefully steered past an oncoming empty truck, spun his wheels for a while in deep ruts choked with mud, and finally braked to a halt a hair's breadth away from the red taillights of the last garbage truck in the line. He killed the engine and looked at his watch. It was about half past four.

"We'll be standing here for a good hour." Andrei said cheerfully. "Let's go and see who's up in front of us."

Another truck drove up from behind and stopped. "Go on your own," said Donald, leaning back in his seat and pulling the brim of his hat down over his face.

Then Andrei also leaned back, adjusted the spring underneath him, and lit a cigarette. Up ahead, unloading was proceeding at full tilt -- trash can lids clattered, the tallyman's high voice shouted: "... eight... ten... ," a thousand-candle-power lamp under a flat tin plate swayed on its pole. Then suddenly voices from several different throats started yelling at once: "Where are you going? Fuck it!"; "Pull back!"; "You're the blind asshole here!"; "You looking for a smack in the mouth?" There were massive heaps of garbage, compacted into a dense mass, looming up on the left and the right, and a ghastly smell of rotten food wafted on the night breeze.