…this mystery that fell from heaven knows which sky,

this CREATURE OF UNKNOWN KIND

turned this place into a separate country,

into a magic country,

into an evil magic country from a magical alien planet…

When you have eliminated the impossible,

whatever remains, however improbable,

must be the truth.

“The Sign of the Four”

The terms from the novels by I. Efremov,

A. and B. Strugatsky, I. Varshavsky and

F. Herbert are used in the following text…

“Requiem for the Pilot”

PROLOGUE

In the intervals between the vomiting spasms, every second of which was successful, Ensign Bashkalo, standing firmly on all fours on the left of Vadim, proclaimed the following:

– Mother… Aggrr… M-mother-f… Blaeee!.. Never again!… Damn it!… Damn all this crap of unknown kind… Fuck it!.. To hell with it!… Uuuuurrlaaa! Damn it with its gas meteorites, with its fogs, with its fucking heaviness-lightness and transparent vehicles.. damn it, b-bitch, neither bottom, nor tops! Blyuerrrrrgaaa! Fucking Gorbachev!

Senior Ensign Petrovich, who was also barfing on all fours on the right of Vadim, did not utter any understandable words. He was much older, and maybe that's why he was throwing up much more violently. But maybe age did not matter at all, and Mother-Trouble¹1 charged him for the passage in full, not partly.

Vadim did not feel sick at all. Physically, all was normal for him, no vomiting, no cramps, no bloody mist between the eye lens and the retina, actually he was not even frightened as he was supposed to, such an incredible deed they had accomplished, human fear was just inapplicable. Another level of shock had to be experienced in this case, something like the aura of the first step into open Space, with a view the whole world, when your personal life and death are not particularly significant in the context of this achievement, and you are conscious of it. Like that. Physically Vadim was tired, as if he was rubber and inflatable and he had suddenly been pierced with a needle. No less, but no more either. He was standing between Bashkalo and Petrovich, resting the hands on his knees, and, trying not to move, he looked at the pole number 323, the first one on this side of the railway, and imagined a man who had stuck it in the brown clay of the Astrakhan semi-desert one day (A year ago? A year and a half ago? A thousand years ago?). There was someone who first crossed the royal narrow-gauge railway, who had guessed to step on board of the second railcar passing by, iron only in appearance, but to touch, in the light – it was a ghostly film take, projected by a mysterious unknown type of film projector on a load of tobacco smoke… What is it called?.. “Combined shooting”!²1 Someone thought up, guessed, found out about jumping through the iron ghost, and crossed an impassable, deadly, cruelly killing railroad. Someone risked it first. And stuck the pole into a bush of black wormwood. Pole three hundred and twenty-three. The first one on this side. And also, probably, was puking… Most likely Senior Ensign Petrovich personally knows this genius, hero and psycho. Or maybe it was he himself? How it rinses him out! Similar to Vadim himself yesterday on the “neutral” when the Zone was welcoming and evaluating him.

Time was passing, whether a dozens or hundreds of seconds went by, but Bashkalo's vocabulary exhausted itself and Petrovich no longer sobbed weepingly spewing out his afternoon snack, and soon there only were two raucous breaths on the left and right. And the smells, unexpectedly strong as if they were in a small enclosed space. Then everything completely subsided, and Vadim noticed that Petrovich is sitting on the ground in Shukshin's pose³2, barefoot, and attentively looking at him from under the long visor of a blue American cap. Looking unkindly, wiping the mouth and under it with a green handkerchief. Vadim straightened up immediately, raised his “forty-seventh”⁴3 by the strap which was clamped in his fist, and fixed it at the prescribed place, ungovernable in ordinary life. Petrovich did not say a word, looked away, folded and removed the handkerchief, quickly stood up and began to shovel wet clay with a heel, covering the eruption. He picked up his “stick” – a broken pole without a disc, also poking the mud onto a puddle of vomit with it. For some reason, he needed to – to clean up the dirt, to cover his shit. But maybe it was necessary? Among Mother-Trouble it is necessary to clean up, always and inevitably, to cover the results of bodily functions, including metabolic products, either rear and front, to hide them, to bury, as nobody knows what could happen to these results and products. What could be the outcome? Not even because they, scouts, can be tracked down, but because the vomit can come to life and eat them, having found and caught them from below.

What Vadim had already understood was that Petrovich does not act in the Zone in vain or for nothing. So he nipped a chuckle “Vomit follows the trail!” in a bud. Everything is real in the Zone.

– You!… What is your name… Sverzhin! – exhaustedly said Bashkalo, laying down on his side. He was also wearing an American cap, but this one was colored in dirty-yellow and had an inscription. He was wearing it backwards. – So you didn't even spit after the vehicle? Just passed through and that's all? As if you, a cub, know the Zone and it knows you? Damned contractor…

Vadim shrugged, feeling the weight of the backpack and the strap of the rifle slipping from his right shoulder. How Bashkalo was obsessed with this contract. Actually it is called “contract of employment for extended service”. Yazov, the Minister of Defense. Signature, date. “It's already the second time the Defense Minister hires you personally to work”, Mumbler⁵4 squeaked the obvious again.

– So here the fuck you are! – said Bashkalo with condemnation.

– Vasya, clean up after yourself, – Petrovich said to him quietly, picked up his backpack, put it on his back, raised his machine gun by the strap, hung it on a shoulder, took off the cap, inspected it, put it on.

Bashkalo, glancing at Vadim and hissing under the breath, was kicking a bump, shaggy with last year's grass. “A chunk”, thought Vadim. A Soviet Ensign is “demobbed” until retirement. At this moment he remembered Ensign Antonov and smiled. Not every Ensign is.

Senior Ensign Petrovich was looking around attentively, Vadim followed his example. On this side of the railroad visibility was “a million per million”, no atmospheric condensation, no precipitation, no light pockets. No ashes, which hellishly annoyed them in the morning. The mound was low and the highway on the other side was also perfectly visible, the poles on it, the sheen of the first frost on its concrete, and even the KUNG⁶ with the screaming dead people, collapsed into the concrete, was visible in the distance. “However”, thought Vadim, “for some reason they cannot be heard from here.”

And the vehicle, that looked like a mechanical corpse with three passenger railcars, one of which was that “combined shonoting”, had already disappeared.

How much time had passed?

Vadim scraped off the hazmat suit's cuff from his wrist and looked at the numbers on his seven-melody “Montana” exchanged, by the way, with lieutenant Gonza for the phalanx in epoxy on plexiglass not far from here less than two years ago. It was half past eleven in the morning. Today. And from the “Obelisk” site – the place of the previous halt – they left at twelve fifteen, according to the same watch. Today. Damn it. Vadim barely restrained the urge to bring the watch to his ear, to check if they worked.

– Keep going. The way we went before to pole number three hundred twenty-four, – said Petrovich. – Are you ready, Vasily? Sverzhin? Throw away your watch. I told you, the track is biased. Go. This direction.

And turning on the heels, using his stick (the broken pole) he casually showed the exact direction. Along the mound, take the left. “God, what familiar places are these. How many times I have traveled from “seventeenth” to Ten, that means Kapustin, and back. As exactly on this vehicle by exactly this railway, as along exactly this road by bus, and once by “ambulance”, and about ten times with Zhitkur and Doctor Vyatkin in a famous brand new “Willis”, released in '43.”

Vadim moved, meanwhile adjusting the backpack's belts and his rifle's strap, falling from his shoulder. It is strange that wearing a rifle on the neck is forbidden by order. But what isn't strange here… here, ahead, is the old track from the heavy machine, apparently the launcher, and probably it is five or maybe forty years old…

The steppe was disfigured. It was said that when Korolev came here with a platoon of soldiers, here were a lots of tulips, and now only red clay is seen out through the wormwood like a bald bookkeeper's head… “You have to negotiate the tracks carefully. Especially this one!” Vadim suddenly realized (sensed), sharply reducing speed.

– Well, – said Ensign Petrovich from the rear.

The track was “taken out”. For the second time that day and the second time in his life, Vadim has seen this. He expected that, as in the morning, Bashkalo would kick-start his sensible whining that here it is, taken out, that means for sure that a loot⁷2 is firing nearby, it would be nice to look around, to comb the area, because this is a thousand, even divided into three, is falling into the pocket… But now, for some reason, Bashkalo was not whining.

Vadim could feel the look of the Senior with his backpack and did everything by the book: he stopped, lifted an open palm, stopping the group, pulled from under his belt a strip of gauze, threw it on the track and waited with bated breath, and only after stepped over, “having marked the beginning of the movement by the same gesture of an open palm, visible by the wingman”, came to the paired trail and repeated the actions exactly. More to it, it is necessary not to cross it right above the gauze. Hell knows what. The Zone knows what Mumbler said somewhere between Vadim's eyes.

There was nothing to object.

– Look, the track is discharged, without a loot, – said Petrovich from behind. – I picked it up a long time ago. “Gnatyuk” was here, such a cutie. You see, although the trail is taken out, it's littered. And the working, evil track is always very clean, as if someone just passed by. Like on wet sand. But you did everything right, I have to praise you. Keep moving.

They went on down the track. Protective Mumbler in Vadim's head at the point behind the nose bridge, after awakening never shut up, spoke measuredly, mumbling, something like “You never left here, right? Did not demobilize and still live at the famous Range, right? As if you got into the “I am going to army again” dream, right? As if there weren't three years at home, Maika didn't exist, Katty wasn't born…”

– Stop! – Petrovich said sharply.

Vadim stood with a raised leg, then warily lowered it. He didn't turn back. Mumbler became silent. Both ears open, palms open. Ears and hands are required to be open up to the wrists in all weathers, under any circumstances. In winter the hat's ears must not be down! And no gloves or mittens.

– Vasya, fuck! Gnaw your butt! – said Petrovitch in a strange voice.

Here Vadim turned around cautiously – with his whole body.

Bashkalo, the rear-guard and the driver of the group, was looming ten meters behind as required. And Senior Ensign Petrovich, left his pole stuck in the wet steppe, in violation of all charters and unofficial spells, went to him, that means back. He went back, slowly raising his hands on the both sides of the cap. Going right up to the frozen Ensign, Petrovich dropped his hands so vigorously and spread them down there so vexatiously, and in an accent point-blank cursed the Ensign's mother, that Vadim realized: exactly It⁸1, lying in wait for every third neophyte, has come to the first scouting mission of the private contract soldier, Sverzhin, Vadim Valentinovich, into the Zone. The exercise is finished, arms for inspection. Thanks for being alive. This, however, is unknown.

– Didn't get you, Nikolaich! – Hissing, just as with a fright, but also with a challenge, said Bashkalo.

Senior Ensign Petrovich walked around him, as if he was a Christmas tree, and asked in a hopeless-calm tone:

– Vasya, comrade Soviet Ensign! Where is the cart? Where are the poles? Damn your mother in all ways!

Bashkalo whirled himself around so, that even the KHM⁹2 swung on him, slapped both his sides, and from ten meters away Vadim saw how his round face sharply and completely burned, turning exactly the color of a disk on a pole. It became even more crimson than disc painted with iron oxide. Even his facial features disappeared and only the mustache was protruding like swollen scratches. The red muzzle of the Ensign. Vadim had never read a book, but certainly in one there is this: “the red muzzle of the Ensign”.

“Let's not forget, all of a sudden”, said Mumbler importantly, “that Bashkalo has been going to the Zone from the very beginning, that he is a skillful and tireless stalker, and that an KHM, for some reason called by trackers along with AK-47, sings in Bashkalo's hands at the firing line cleaner than a nightingale. You should be careful with him.”

– Nikolaich… – Said Bashkalo. – Damn, Nikolaich! I don't know! Don't remember! I fucked up, Nikolaich!

In the garden cart, gently painted in grey color, Bashkalo was driving fifty poles – sharpened, treated with linseed oil cuttings for mops with numbered disks nailed to them by copper braces. Gently painted in bright red, fiery color. (The whole previous month, Vadim had dedicated two or three hours every God's day to painting carts and poles.) The combat mission of the group of the Senior Ensign Petrovich in today's expedition was formulated as “reconnaissance and designation of the third quarter of the route 'Obelisk – m/u 20224 '.” In that way, the loss of the poles was ruining the task, the mission in general, and Petrovich's reputation, as it is said: “the Senior officer is responsible.”

– As in a dream, Nikolaich, don't remember! – Bashkalo said earnestly. – Missed it!

“The chunk is lying”, thought Vadim. (Or that was Mumbler?) “He does remember. Left it intentionally. There, in a ditch below the embankment. There the cart is standing now, and forever. He was supposed to go last, dragging the cart along the gravel and across the rails, and in horror, and blindly, when the third railcar easily could catch the cart, also pulling him, could knock him down and chew him up under the real wheels… so to hell with it, the cart, and on the other side of the railway – be that as it may. The money for the mission had already dripped in, and next time Petrovich would not take him. And glory to the CPSU¹⁰1. Missions with Petrovich aren't worth it. They almost draw lots.” For weeks the trackers had been talking among themselves, the rumor penetrated even in the “geese house”, and Vadim knows it, that Senior Ensign Petrovich now goes for terrifying tracks, not around the “neutral” but in the most unknown steppe; beats the wedges in the Zone, in those places where regular three kilometers on a map objectively had became thirty kilometers long time ago. In the most direct meaning – thirty, stretched “by the anomalous intensities of unknown kind near the surface of the planet Earth”.

“The last thing I need is the ability to read thoughts”, Vadim thought with unsighted anger. Now what? They have three complete poles, “connecting ones”: Vadim carried them in the backpack's loop, like swords in a movie with Bruce Lee. Another one, broken, was used by Petrovich instead of a cane (“Instead of a staff!”).

Petrovich silently returned to the middle of the distance between Bashkalo and Vadim. Pulled out the cane-staff.

– Sverzhin, go to the three hundred and twenty-fourth, – he ordered in his usual voice. – Take the next pole on the right, in three meters, and there stop on command. Forward, march.

Vadim took the pole in his right hand after ten minutes. It was sticking out askew, strongly rotated edge-on to their route. Vadim waited for the command, turned to his superior and fell on his knee feeling sweat between stocking of the hazmat suit and breeches. It was hot. Petrovich walked around the pole, made a “spiral” in two turns from it, “inspecting” the air, its density and humidity with his hands, then said pointing to the chosen place:

– Here we rest, have lunch and a smoke break. Bashkalo with me. Sverzhin stay where you are. Watch quietly, as it's done. If you smoke – smoke.

Bashkalo went to the specified place, both with Petrovich they knelt, facing each other, took off their backpacks and began to built the dastarkhan¹¹