The third day of their stay at the station arrived. Time here did not pass according to the usual twenty-four-hour day; it crawled along like a slug, in the seconds of an unending nightmare. Artyom had already grown accustomed to the idea that nobody would ever approach him and talk to him again, and that the fate of a pariah was in store for him. It was as though he were no longer human and had turned into an inconceivably monstrous being, whom people saw not just as something ugly and repulsive, but also somehow perceptibly related to themselves – and that scared them and repulsed them even more, as if they might catch this monstrousness from him, as if he were a leper.

First he worked out an escape plan. Then came a resounding void of despair. After that a dull stupor took over, in which his intellect was disconnected from his life; he turned inward, drew in the threads of feeling and sensation, and went into a cocoon somewhere in a remote corner of consciousness. Artyom continued to work mechanically, his motions as precise as those of an automaton – all he had to do was dig, dump, roll, and dig again, roll again, drain, and go back the other way, faster, to start digging again. His dreams lost any meaning, and in them, just as in his waking hours, he endlessly ran, dug, pushed, pushed, dug, and ran.

On the evening of the fifth day, Artyom, pushing the wheelbarrow, tripped over a shovel that had been left on the floor; the wheelbarrow overturned, the contents spilled, and then he fell down into it himself. When he arose slowly from the floor, an idea suddenly popped into his head, and instead of running for a bucket and cloth, he slowly and deliberately headed for the entrance to the tunnel. He himself could feel that he was now so loathsome, so repulsive, that his aura would have to drive anyone away. And just at the moment, due to an improbable confluence of circumstances, the security guard who was invariably hanging around at the end of his route, was, for some reason, not there. Without giving a moment’s thought to whether someone might be chasing him, Artyom started off across the ties. Blinded, but hardly stumbling, he walked faster and faster, until breaking into a run; but his reason had not returned to the job of directing his body; it was still holed up, cowering in its corner.

Behind him he heard no shouts, no footsteps of pursuers; only the trolley clattered by, loaded with cargo and lighting its way with a dim lantern. Artyom simply pressed himself against the wall, letting it go past. The people on board either did not notice him or did not consider it necessary to pay him any attention; their gazes passed over him without lingering, and they didn’t say a word.

Suddenly he was seized with a feeling of his own invulnerability, conferred on him by his fall. Covered with stinking sludge, it was as if he had become invisible; this gave him strength, and consciousness gradually began to return. He had done it! Who knew how? Against all good sense, despite everything, he had managed to escape from the accursed station, and nobody was even following him! It was strange, it was amazing, but it seemed to him that, if he were only to try right now to comprehend what had happened, to dissect the miracle with the cold scalpel of rationality, then the magic would dissipate immediately, and the beam of the searchlight from a patrol trolley would quickly strike him in the back.

Light shone at the end of the tunnel. He slackened his pace, and after a minute he was at Dobryninskaya.

The border guard there satisfied himself with the simple question, ‘Did they call for a sanitary technician?’ and quickly let him through, waving away the air around himself with one hand while holding the other over his mouth. Artyom had to keep moving, to get out of Hansa territory fast, before the security guards finally gathered their wits, before he could hear behind him the tramp of iron-rimmed jackboots; before warning shots thundered out into the air, and then… Faster.

Not looking at anyone, keeping his eyes to the floor, his skin crawling with the disgust those around him felt for him, a vacuum forming around him so that he did not have to elbow his way through the dense crowd, Artyom strode to the border post. And now what was he going to say? More questions, more demands to present his passport. How could he reply?

Artyom’s head hung so low that his chin touched his chest, and he saw absolutely nothing around him, so that the only things he remembered about the whole station were the dark, neatly arranged granite slabs of the floor. He kept walking, frozen with anticipation of the moment when he would hear the peremptory order to stand still. Hansa’s border was closer and closer. Now… Right now…

‘What kind of rubbish is this?’ a gasping voice resounded in his ear. There it was.

‘I… it… I got lost. I’m not from here…’ muttered Artyom, tongue-tied from nervousness or maybe just getting into his role.

‘Well get the hell out of here, do you hear, you ugly mug?!’ The voice sounded very persuasive, almost hypnotic, making him want to obey right away.

‘Sure I… I would…’ mumbled Artyom, afraid, not knowing how to get out of this one.

‘Begging is strictly forbidden on Hansa territory!’ the voice said sternly, and this time it was from a greater distance.

‘Of course, right away… I have little children…’ Artyom finally realized what button to press, and became more animated.

‘What children? Are you nuts?!’ The invisible border guard flew into a rage. ‘Popov, Lomako, come here! Get this scumbag out of here!’

Neither Popov nor Lomako wanted to soil their hands by touching Artyom, so they just shoved him in the back with the barrels of their automatics. Their superior’s angry curses flew after them. To Artyom, this sounded like heavenly music.

Serpukhovskaya station! He had left the Hansa behind!

Finally he looked up, but what he saw in the eyes of the people surrounding him made him look back at the floor. This was not tidy Hansan territory; he was once again in the midst of the dirty, poverty-stricken bedlam that reigned throughout the rest of the metro. But even here, Artyom was too loathsome. The miraculous armour that had saved him along the way, making him invisible, forcing people to turn away from the fugitive and not to notice him, to let him through all the outposts and checkpoints, had now turned back into a stinking, shitty scab.

Evidently it was already past noon.

Now that the initial exultation had worn off, that strange strength, as if borrowed from someone else, which had forced him to keep walking across the stretch from Paveletskaya to Dobryninskaya, abruptly disappeared and left him alone with himself – hungry, deathly tired, without a penny to his name, giving off an unbearable stench, still showing traces of the blows of the week before.

The paupers next to whom he had sat down along the wall, decided that they could no longer abide such company, crawled away from him, cursing, in various directions, and he was left completely alone. Hugging his shoulders so as not to feel so cold, he closed his eyes and sat there for a long while, thinking about absolutely nothing, until sleep overcame him.

Artyom was walking along an unfinished tunnel. It was longer than all those he had traversed throughout his whole life, rolled into one. The tunnel twisted and turned, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, but was never straight for more than ten paces. But it just went on and on, and walking became harder and harder; his feet, blistered and bloody, were hurting, his back ached, each new step called forth an echo of pain throughout his body; but as long as hope remained that the exit was not far away, maybe just around that next corner, Artyom found the strength to keep going. But then suddenly the simple, but terrifying thought occurred to him: what if the tunnel had no exit? If both the entrance and exit were closed, if someone invisible and omnipotent had shut him off – left him thrashing around, like a rat unsuccessfully trying to reach the experimenter’s finger, in this maze without exit, so that he would keep dragging himself along until he gave out, until he collapsed – and doing this for no reason, just for fun? A rat in a maze. A squirrel in a wheel. But then, he thought, if continuing along the road does not lead to the exit, will refusing any senseless forward motion perhaps bestow liberation? He sat down on a railway tie, not because he was tired, but because he was at the end of his rope. The walls around him disappeared, and he thought: in order to achieve the goal, to complete the journey, all I have to do is to stop walking. Then this thought faded away and disappeared.