CHAPTER 13. The Great Library

Artyom went out into the station, looking from side to side with a mad look in his eye. He had just entered into one of the strangest agreements of his life. His employers refused to even explain what, exactly, he was supposed to find in the stack archives, promising to provide him with details later, after he had already gone up to the surface. And though it had occurred to him, for a moment, that they were talking about the Book Daniel had told him about the night before, he didn’t dare ask the Brahmins about it. Then, too, both of them had been pretty drunk yesterday, when his hospitable host had told him this secret, so there was reason to doubt its truth.

He would not be going to the surface alone. The Brahmins intended to outfit an entire detachment. Artyom was to go up with at least two stalkers and one person from the caste, to whom he was to immediately give what had been found, should the expedition meet with success. That same person would show Artyom something that would help eliminate the threat hanging over VDNKh.

Now, having emerged from the impenetrable gloom of the room onto the platform, the terms of the agreement seemed absurd to Artyom. As in the old fairy tale, he was required to go he knew not where, to fetch he knew not what, and in exchange, he was promised he knew not what kind of miraculous salvation. But what else could he do? Return with empty hands? Is that what the hunter expected of him?

When Artyom had asked his mysterious employers how he would find what they were looking for in the giant stacks of the Library, he was told that he would understand everything in due course. He would hear. He didn’t ask any more questions, fearful that the Brahmins would lose their confidence in his extraordinary abilities, in which he himself did not believe. Finally, he was strictly warned that the soldiers must not learn anything, else the agreement would no longer be in force.

Artyom sat down on a bench in the centre of the hall and started to think. This was an incredible chance to go out onto the surface, do what he had only done once before, and do it without fear of punishment or consequences. To go up on the surface – and not alone, but with real stalkers – to carry out a secret mission for the guardian caste… He hadn’t even asked them why they so detested the word ‘librarian.’

Melnik slumped down on the bench next to him. Now he looked tired and overwrought.

‘Why’d you say yes?’ he asked, without expression and looking in front of him.

‘How’d you find out?’ asked Artyom, surprised. Less than a quarter hour had passed since his conversation with the Brahmins.

‘I’ll have to go with you,’ continued Melnik in a dull voice, ignoring the question. ‘I answer to Hunter for you now, whatever’s happened to him. And there’s no backing out on an agreement with the Brahmins. Nobody’s done it yet. And above all, don’t think about blabbing to the military.’ He got up, shook his head, and added: ‘If you only knew what you’re getting into… I’m going to sleep. We’ll be getting up tonight.’

‘But aren’t you in the military?’ asked Artyom, catching up to him. ‘I heard them call you “Colonel”.’

‘Yeah, I’m a colonel, just not in their chain of command,’ answered Melnik grudgingly, and left.

Artyom spent the rest of the day learning about Polis, walking about aimlessly through the limitless space of stairs and passages, examining the majestic colonnades and marvelling at how many people this underground city could accommodate. He studied the whole of the ‘Metro News’ penny sheet, which was printed on brown wrapping paper, listened to vagrant musicians, leafed through books at stalls, played with puppies that were being offered for sale, listened to the latest gossip, and could not shake the feeling that he was being followed all this time and was under constant observation. Several times, he even wheeled around suddenly, hoping to catch someone’s attentive look, but it was no use. He was surrounded by a swarming crowd, and nobody paid any attention to him.

Finding a hotel in one of the passages, he slept for several hours before appearing at ten in the evening, as had been agreed, at the gate of the exit into the city at Borovitskaya. Melnik was running late, but the sentries had been informed and offered Artyom a cup of tea while he waited.

Interrupting himself for a minute to pour boiling water into an enamelled cup, the elderly sentry continued his story:

‘So… I was assigned to listen to the radio. Everyone hoped to catch a transmission from government bunkers beyond the Urals. But it was no use, because the first thing they hit was the strategic targets. That’s how Ramenki got smeared, and all of the out-of-town summer residences, with their basements thirty metres deep, how they got smeared, too… They might have even spared Ramenki… They didn’t try too hard to hit the peaceful population… Nobody knew then that this war was to the very end. So, maybe they might have spared Ramenki, but there was a command point right next to it, so they slammed it… And as far as civilian casualties were concerned, it was all, as they say, collateral damage, you should pardon the expression. But at that time nobody believed that yet, so the brass had me sit and listen to the airwaves over next to Arbatskaya, in a bunker. And initially, I heard a lot of strange stuff… Siberia was quiet, though other parts of the country were broadcasting. Submarines – strategic, nuclear – went on the air. They’d ask whether to strike or not… People didn’t believe that Moscow no longer existed. Full captains were sobbing like kids over the radio. It’s strange, you know, when salty naval officers, who hadn’t uttered a swear word in their entire lives, are crying and asking for someone to check and see if their wives or daughters are among the survivors… “Go, look for them here,” they’d say… And later, they’d all react differently. There were those who said, “That’s it! The hell with it, it’s an eye for an eye!” and they’d get in close to their shores and launch everything against the cities. Others, on the contrary, decided that since everything was already going to hell in a hand basket, there wasn’t any sense in continuing to fight. Why kill more people? But that didn’t have any effect. There were enough out there who wanted to avenge their families. And the boats answered for a long time. They could run under water for half a year while on station. They found some of them, of course, but they couldn’t find all of them. Well, that’s an earful of history. To this day, when I think about it, I get the shakes. But that wasn’t the point. I once picked up a tank crew that miraculously survived a strike; they were ferrying their tank from their unit, or something… It was a new generation of armour technology that protected them from the radiation. So, here were these three guys in this tank, and they light out at full speed from Moscow, headed east. They drove through some burning villages, picked up some broads, and went on, stopping to top off with some straw distillate and then getting back on the road. When the fuel finally ran out, they were in some backwater, where there wasn’t anything left to bomb. The background radiation there, too, remained pretty high, of course, but still it was nothing like it was next to the cities. They laid out a camp, dug their tank in hull-down, and ended up with a sort of fortification. They pitched tents nearby, eventually built mud huts, set up a manual generator for electricity, and lived for a fairly long time around that tank. For two years, I spoke to them almost every night and knew all of what was going on in their personal lives. Everything was quiet at first, they set up a farmstead, and two of them had kids that were… almost normal. They had enough ammo. They saw some weird stuff there, and creatures were coming out of the forest the likes of which the lieutenant we were talking to couldn’t even describe properly. Then they went off the air. I spent another half year trying to raise them, but something happened out there. Maybe their generator or transmitter broke down, or maybe they ran out of ammo…’