"Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The snail on the slope" - читать интересную книгу автора

Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

The snail on the slope


Copyright Arcady And Boris Strugatsky
Copyright Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon.
Copyright Translated from the Russian by Alan Meyers, 1980
Copyright Bantam Books, Inc.
Origin: "Ulitka na sklone"



Chapter One
From this height, the forest was like foam, luxuriant and blotchy, a
gigantic world--encompassing porous sponge, like an animal waiting in
concealment, now fallen asleep and overgrown with rough moss. A formless
mask hiding a face, as yet revealed to none.
Pepper shook off his sandals and sat down with his bare legs dangling
over the precipice. It seemed to him that his heels at once became damp, as
if he had actually immersed them in the warm lilac fog that lay banked up in
the shadows under the cliff. He fished out the pebbles he had collected from
his pocket and laid them out neatly beside him. He then selected the
smallest and gently tossed it down into the living and silent, slumbering,
all-enveloping indifference, and the white spark was extinguished, and
nothing happened--no branch trembled, no eye half-opened to glance up.
If he were to throw a pebble every one and a half minutes, and if what
the one-legged cook, nicknamed Pansy, said was true and what Madame Bardot,
head of the Assistance to the Local Population Group, reckoned, if what
driver Acey whispered to the unknown man from the Engineering Penetration
Group was untrue, and if human intuition was worth anything at all, and if
wishes came true once in a lifetime, then at the seventh stone, the bushes
behind him would part with a crash, and the director would step out onto the
soft crushed grass of the dew-gray clearing. He would be stripped to the
waist in his gray garbardines with the lilac braid, breathing heavily, sleek
and glossy, yellow-pink and shaggy, looking nowhere in particular, neither
at the forest beneath him nor at the sky above him, bending down to bury his
arms in the grass, then unbending to raise a breeze with his broad palms,
each time the mighty fold on his belly bulging out over his trousers, while
air, saturated with carbon dioxide and nicotine, would burst out of his open
mouth with a whistling gurgle.
The bushes behind parted with a crash. Pepper looked around cautiously,
but it wasn't the director, it was someone he knew, Claudius-Octavian
Haus-botcher from the Eradication Group. He approached without haste and
halted two paces away, looking Pepper up and down with his piercing dark
eyes. He knew something or suspected something, something very important,
and this knowledge or suspicion had frozen his long face, the stony face of
a man who had brought here to the precipice a strange, alarming piece of
news. No one in the whole world knew what this news was, but it was already
clear that everything had altered decisively; what had gone before was no