‘But who would need to dig there?’

‘No idea. The old man raved on that some miscreants wanted to dig a tunnel through to the river so that all Polis could bathe, and he had somehow overheard their plans. I immediately gave a warning only no one believed me. I rushed to look for this old man in order to present him as a witness, but he, as luck would have it, had got lost somewhere. An agent provocateur, maybe. And maybe,’ Pavel looked carefully at Ulman and lowered his voice, ‘he really heard how the military are digging something secret. And they buried my old man at the same time. Since then I have had ideas about a drilling rig and they are putting me down as a nutcase. It’s hardly worth saying that they begin to taunt me straight off about the rig.’ He went quiet, looking searchingly at Artyom: what was his attitude to his story?

Artyom vaguely shrugged his shoulders.

‘Not a damned thing heard, empty air!’ the approaching Ulman spat angrily. ‘We can’t get it from here, son of a bitch! We have to get higher: Melnik most likely is too far away.’

Artyom and Pavel immediately started picking up. No one wanted to think about other explanations for why the stalker’s team hadn’t made contact. Ulman folded the antenna into sections, put the radio into the rucksack, lifted his machine gun onto his shoulder and walked off first toward the glass vestibule that was concealed behind the television tower’s mighty pillars. Pavel handed one case to Artyom, took the knapsack and rifle himself, cracked the vehicle’s doors and they followed Ulman.

Inside it was quiet, dirty and empty: people, apparently, once ran from here in a hurry and never returned again. The moon surprisingly shone through the broken, dusty glass onto overturned benches and the broken counter of the ticket office, onto the security post, with the remnants of a service cap forgotten in haste, and onto the broken turnstiles at the entrance, and illuminated stencilled instructions and cautions for visitors to the television tower. They turned off their flashlights and, looking around a little, found the exit to the staircase. The useless elevators that had been able to take people up in less than a minute stood on the first floor with their doors flung feebly open. Now the team was approaching the most difficult area. Ulman explained that they had to get to a height of more than three hundred metres. Artyom did the first two hundred steps with ease. Weeks of travelling around the metro had toughened his legs. He began to flag at three hundred and fifty. The winding staircase stretched upwards, and there was no perceptible difference between the floors. It was damp and cold inside the tower, and, apart from naked concrete walls, all that could be seen was abandoned equipment rooms, through the occasional open door.

Ulman decided to take the first break after five hundred steps but he took only five minutes to rest. He was afraid of missing the moment when the stalker tried to communicate with them.

Artyom lost count after the eight hundredth step. His legs were filled with lead, and each one now weighed three times as much as at the beginning of the climb. Lifting his foot off the floor became very difficult. The floor pulled it back, like a magnet. Perspiration flooded his eyes, and the grey walls floated, as if in a fog, and the insidious steps began to clutch at his boots. He was not able to stop and rest: behind him, panting, was Pavel who was carrying twice as much as Artyom. After about fifteen more minutes, Ulman again allowed them to take a break. Even he looked tired. His chest heaved heavily under the shapeless protective suit, and his hand rummaged along the wall in search of a support. Pulling a canteen with water from the knapsack, the fighter first extended it to Artyom. A special valve was provided in the gas mask through which a catheter passed: one was able to suck water through it. Artyom understood that the others wanted a drink, but he was unable to tear himself away from the rubber tube until the canteen was half empty. Afterwards, he settled to the floor and closed his eyes.

‘Come on, it’s not much further!’ Ulman shouted. He jerked Artyom to his feet, took the case from him, loaded it onto his own shoulders and moved forward.

Artyom didn’t remember how long the final part of the climb took. The steps and walls merged into one dull whole. Beams and spots of light from behind dull stains on the viewing glass looked like radiant clouds and for some time he was distracted by the fact that he was admiring their iridescent tints. The blood pounded in his head, the cold air tore his lungs and the staircase went on forever. Artyom sat down on the floor several times, but they picked him up and forced him to walk. Why was he doing this? So that life could continue in the metro? Right. So that they could grow mushrooms and pigs at VDNKh in the future, and so that his stepfather and Zhenkina’s family lived there in peace, so that people unknown to him could settle at Alekseevskaya and at Rizhskaya, and so that the uneasy bustle of trade at Byelorusskaya didn’t die away. So that the Brahmins could stroll about Polis in their robes and rustle the pages of books, grasping the ancient knowledge and passing it on to subsequent generations. So that the fascists could build their Reich, capturing racial enemies and torturing them to death, and so that the Worm people could spirit away strangers’ children and eat adults, and so that the woman at Mayakovskaya could bargain with her young son in the future, earning herself and him some bread. So that the rat races at Paveletskaya didn’t end, and the fighters of the revolutionary brigade could continue their assaults on fascists and their funny dialectical arguments. And so that thousands of people throughout the whole metro could breathe, eat, love one another, give life to their children, defecate and sleep, dream, fight, kill, be ravished and betrayed, philosophize and hate, and so that each could believe in his own paradise and his own hell… So that life in the metro, senseless and useless, exalted and filled with light, dirty and seething, endlessly diverse, so miraculous and fine could continue. He thought about this, and it was as if a huge crank turned in his back and nudged him to take one more step and another and still another. Thanks to that, he continued to move his feet. And suddenly it all ended. They tumbled into a spacious area – a broad, circular corridor, a closed ring. Its inner wall was faced with marble, and Artyom at once felt as if he were at home. And there was an outer wall… The sky began at immediately behind the completely transparent outer wall, and somewhere far, far below were strewn tiny little homes, split into neighbourhoods by roads and patches of parks, and there were huge black craters and the rectangles of surviving tall buildings… The whole, boundless city, like a grey mass moving toward the dark horizon, could be seen from here. Artyom got down onto the floor, leaning against the wall, and he looked for a very long time at Moscow and the sky slowly turning pink.

‘Artyom! Get up, that’s enough sitting! Come, give us a hand.’ Ulman shook him by the shoulder. The fighter handed him a large bundle of wire, and Artyom stared at it blankly. ‘This damned antenna won’t pick up anything,’ Ulman pointed at the twisted six-metre probe scattered on the floor. ‘We’ll try the loop. Over there’s a door to the engineering balcony, a floor below us. The exit is right there on the Botanical Garden side. I’ll stay here with the radio, you go outside with Pashka, he’ll uncoil the antenna, you secure it. Be lively ’cause it will start to get light soon.’

Artyom nodded. He remembered why he was here and he got a second wind. Someone had tightened that invisible crank in his back and that inner spring began once more to unwind. Only a short while remained to the goal. He took the spool and moved towards the balcony door. The door didn’t give, and Ulman had to fire a whole salvo into it before the glass, riddled by his bullets, cracked and spilled out. A powerful gust of wind almost knocked them off their feet. Artyom stepped onto a balcony enclosed by a grate the height of a man.