The Doomed City by Arkadi Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky

Author:Arkadi Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky [Strugatsky, Arkadi & Strugatsky, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novela, Ciencia ficción
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1971-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

3

The offices were empty. The staff had obviously fled when the shooting started up around City Hall. Andrei walked through the rooms, indifferently surveying the scattered sheets of paper and overturned chairs, the dirty plates with the remains of sandwiches and cups with the remains of coffee. Loud, rousing music was coming from somewhere farther inside, and that was strange. Selma plodded after him, holding on to his sleeve. She kept saying something over and over, something shrewish, but Andrei wasn’t listening to her. What did I come here for, he thought. They’ve all bolted, every last one of them, and they were right. I should be safe at home now, lying in bed, hugging my poor battered side and dozing, not giving a rotten damn for any of this…

At first he didn’t realize it was Izya. Standing at the table farthest away, in the corner, stooped over an open binder of back issues and propping himself up on hands set wide apart, was a stranger with his hair carelessly trimmed in wedges, wearing a suspicious-looking gray garment with no buttons, and it was only when this man suddenly grinned in a familiar way a moment later and started plucking at a wart on his neck with a familiar gesture that Andrei realized he was looking at Izya.

Andrei stood in the doorway for a while, watching him. Izya hadn’t heard Andrei come in. He couldn’t hear or notice a thing—first, he was reading, and second, a loudspeaker hanging directly above his head was blasting out the thunderous jangling of a victorious march. Then Selma exclaimed in an appalling wail, “Oh, look, it’s Izya!” and she darted forward, pushing Andrei aside.

Izya quickly looked up and spread out his arms, grinning even more broadly. “Aha!” he yelled delightedly. “So here you are!”

While Izya hugged Selma, delightedly smothering her cheeks and lips in kisses, while Selma squealed something unintelligible and ecstatic and ruffled up Izya’s ugly hair, Andrei walked across to them, struggling to overcome his acute sense of awkwardness. The searing feeling of guilt and betrayal that had almost knocked him off his feet that morning in the basement had been blunted and almost forgotten over the last year, but now it transfixed him again, and after he got close, he hesitated for a few seconds before daring to hold out his hand. He would have found it perfectly natural if Izya had ignored this hand of his, or even said something witheringly contemptuous—that was probably exactly what Andrei would have done. But Izya freed himself from Selma’s embrace, grabbed Andrei’s hand with eager passion, shook it, and asked with keen interest, “Where did they give you that beautiful shiner?”

“I was beaten,” Andrei replied tersely. He was astounded by Izya. There were many things he wanted to tell him, but all he did was ask, “So how come you’re here?”

Instead of answering, Izya flipped over several pages of the bound newspapers and gestured in exaggerated fashion as he declaimed with gusto, “

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