"Let me never grow old," she said.

"Excellent," I said. "That's one."

"Let me..." she began inspiredly and stopped.

I used to enjoy tremendously asking my friends this very question and used to ask it at every available opportunity.

Several times I even a.s.signed compositions to my youngsters on the theme of three wishes. And it was always most amusing that out of a thousand men and women, oldsters and children, only two or three dozen figured that it is possible to wish not only for themselves personally, or their immediate close ones, but also for the world at large, for mankind as a whole. No, this was not witness to the ineradicable human egotism; the wishes were not invariably strictly selfish, and the majority in subsequent discussions, when reminded of missed opportunities and the large problems of all mankind, did a double take and in honest anger reproached me that I hadn't explained at the beginning. But one way or another they all began their reply along the lines of "Let me..." This was a manifestation of some kind of ancient subconscious conviction that your own personal wishes cannot change anything in the wide world, and it makes no difference whether you do or do not have a magic wand.

"Let me..." began Vousi once more, and again was silent. I was watching her surrept.i.tiously. She noticed this, and dissolving into a broad smile, said with a wave of her hand, "So that's your game. Some card you are!"

"No -- no -- no," I said. "You should always be prepared to answer this question. Because I knew a man once who always asked it of everyone, and then was inconsolable -- 'Oh what an opportunity I missed, how could I not have figured it out?' So you see it's entirely in earnest. Your first wish is never to grow old. And then?"

"Let's see -- what else? Of course, it would be nice to have a handsome fellow, whom they would all chase, but who would be with me only. Always."

"Wonderful," I said. "That's two. And what else?"

Her face showed that the game had already palled on her, and that any second she'd drop a bomb. And she did. All I could do was blink my eyes.

"Yes," I said, "of course that, too. But that happens even without any magic."

"Yes and no," she argued and began to develop the idea, based on the misfortunes of her clients. All of which was very gay and amusing to her, while I, in ignominious confusion, gulped brandy with lemon and t.i.ttered in embarra.s.sment, feeling like a virgin wall flower. Well, if all this went on in a night club, I could handle it. Well, well, well... some fine activities go on in those salons of the Good Mood. How do you like these elderly ladies...

"Enough," I said. "Vousi, you embarra.s.s me, and anyway I understand it all very well now. I can see that it's really impossible to do without magic. It's a good thing that I am not a magician."

"I really stung you well," she said happily. "And what would you wish for yourself, now?"

I decided I'd reciprocate in kind.

"I don't need anything of that sort," I said. "Anyway, I am not good at things like that. I'd like a good solid slug."

She smiled gaily.

"I don't need three wishes," I explained, "I can do with one."

She was still smiling, but the smile became empty, then crooked, and then disappeared altogether.

"What?" she said in a small voice.

"Vousi!" I said, getting up. "Vousi!"

She didn't seem to know what to do. She jumped up and then sat down and then jumped up again. The coffee table fell over with all the bottles. There were tears in her eyes, and her face looked pitiable, like that of a child who has been brutally, insolently, cruelly, tauntingly deceived. Suddenly she bit her lip and with all her strength slapped my face.

While I was blinking, she, now in full tears, kicked away the overturned table and ran out of the room. I sat, with my mouth open. An engine roared into life and lights sprang up in the dark garden, followed by the sound of the motor traversing the yard and disappearing in the distance.

I felt my face. Some joke. Never in my life have I joked so effectively. What an old fool I was! How do you like that for a slug?

"May we?" asked Len. He stood in the door, and he was not alone. With him was a gloomy, freckle-faced boy with a cleanly shaved head.

"This is Reg," said Len. "Could he sleep here too?"

"Reg," I said, pensively smoothing my eyelids. "Of course -- even two Regs would be okay. Listen, Len, why didn't you come ten minutes earlier!"

"But she was here," said Len. "We were looking in the window, waiting for her to leave."

"Really?" I said. "Very interesting. Reg, old chum, how about what your parents will say?"

Reg didn't reply. Len said, "He doesn't have parents."

"Well, all right," I said, feeling a bit tired. "You're not going to have a pillow fight?"

"No," said Len, not smiling, "we are going to sleep."

"Fair enough," I said. "I'll make your beds and you can give all this a quick clean-up."

I made their beds on the couch and the big chair and they took off their clothes at once and went to bed. I locked the door to the hall, turned out their lights, and went into my bedroom, where I sat awhile listening to them whispering, moving furniture, and settling down. Then they were quiet.

About eleven o'clock there was the sound of broken gla.s.s somewhere in the house. Aunt Vaina's voice could be heard singing some sort of marching song, followed by more breaking gla.s.s. Apparently the tireless Pete again was falling down face first. From the center of town came the cry of "Shivers, shivers." Someone was loudly sick on the street.

I locked the window and lowered the shades. I also locked the door to the study. Then I went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water. I did everything per instructions. The radio went on the soap shelf, I threw several Devon tablets in the water, together with some salt crystals, and was about to swallow the tablet when I remembered that it was propitious to "loosen up." I didn't want to disturb the boys, but it wasn't necessary -- an open bottle of brandy stood in the medicine chest. I took a few swallows right out of the bottle, stripped down to the skin, climbed into the bath, and turned on the radio.

Chapter ELEVEN.

I intentionally did not set the thermo-regulator, so that when the water cooled off, I returned to consciousness. The radio was still shrieking and the sparkle of white light on the walls hurt my eyes. I was thoroughly chilled and covered with goose b.u.mps. Switching off the radio, I turned on the hot water and remained in the bath, basking in the flooding warmth and a very strange, very novel sensation of total, cosmically enormous emptiness. I expected a hangover, but there wasn't any. I simply felt good. And there were very many memories.

Also my thoughts flowed inordinately well, as though after a long rest in the mountains.

In the middle of the last century, Olds and Miller had conducted experiments on brain stimulation. They inserted electrodes into the brains of white rats. They employed a primitive technology and a barbarous methodology, but having located pleasure centers in the rats' brains, they succeeded in having the animals press the lever which closed the contacts to the electrodes, hour after hour, producing up to eight thousand auto-excitations per hour. These rats did not need anything in the real world. They weren't in the slightest interested in anything but the lever. They ignored food, water, danger, females; they were indifferent to everything except the stimulation lever. Later, these experiments were tried on monkeys and produced the same results. Rumors were about that someone carried out similar experiments on criminals condemned to death....

That was a difficult time for mankind: a time of struggle against atomic destruction, a time of increasing limited wars over the entire face of the planet, a time when the majority of mankind was starving, but even so, the contemporary English writer and critic Kingsley Amis, having learned of the experiments with rats, wrote: "I cannot be sure that this frightens me more than a Berlin or a Taiwan crisis, but it should, I believe, frighten me more." He feared much about the future, this brilliant and venomous author of New Maps of h.e.l.l, and: in particular, he foresaw the possibilities of brain stimulation for the creation of an illusory existence, just as intense as the actual, or more intense.

By the end of the century, when the first triumphs of wave psychotechnology were realized, and when psychiatric wards began to empty, amid the chorus of exulting cries of science commentators, the little brochure by Krinitsky and Milanovitch had sounded like an irritating dissonance. In its concluding section the Soviet educators wrote approximately as follows: In the overwhelming majority of countries, the education of the young exists on the level of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This ancient system of education always did and continues to posit as its objective, first of all and above all, the preparation for society of qualified but stupefied contributors to the production process. This system is not interested in all the other potentialities of the human mind, and for this reason, outside of the production process, man, en ma.s.se, remains psychologically a cave dweller, Man the Uneducated. The disuse of these potentialities causes the individuals' inability to comprehend our complex world in all its contradictions, to correlate psychologically incompatible concepts and phenomena, to obtain pleasure from the examination of connections and laws when these do not pertain directly to the satisfaction of the most primitive social instincts. In other words, this system of education for all practical purposes does not develop in man pure imagination, untrammeled vision, and as an immediate consequence, the sense of humor.

The Uneducated Man perceives the world as some sort of essentially trivial, routine, and traditionally simple process, a world from which it is possible only by dint of great effort to extract pleasures which are, in the end, also compulsively routine and traditional. But even the unutilized potentialities remain, apparently, a hidden reality of the human brain. The problem for scientific education consists precisely in initiating the action of these possibilities, in teaching man to dream, in bringing the multiordinality and variety of psychic a.s.sociations into quant.i.tative and qualitative coordination with the multiordinality and variety of interrelationships in the world of reality. This problem is the one which, as is well known, must become the fundamental one for mankind in the coming proximate epoch. But until this problem is resolved, there remains some basis to fear that the successes of psychotechnics will lead to such methods of electrical stimulation as will endow man with an illusory existence which can exceed the real existence in intensity and variety by a considerable margin. And if one remembers that imagination allows man to be both a rational being and a sensual animal, and if one adds to that the fact that the psychic subject matter evoked by the Uneducated Man for his illusory life of splendor derives from the darkest, most primitive reflexes, then it is not hard to perceive the awful temptation hidden in such possibilities.

And therefore -- slug.

It is now understandable, I thought, why they write the word "slug" on fences.

Everything is now understandable. It's odious, that I understand.... Better if I understood nothing, better if, upon regaining consciousness, I shrugged my shoulders and climbed out of the bath. Would it have been understandable to Strogoff and Einstein and Petrarch? Imagination is a priceless gift, but it must not be given an inward direction. Only outward, only outward... What a tasty worm some corrupter has dropped from his rod into this stagnant pool! And how accurately timed! Yes indeed, if I were commander of Wells' Martians, I would not have bothered with fighter tripods, heat rays, and other such nonsense. Illusory existence ... no, this is not a narcotic, a narcotic has a long way to go to approach it. In a. way this is exactly appropriate. Here. Now. To each time its own. Poppy seeds and hemp, the kingdom of sweet blurred shadows and peace -- for the beggar, the worn-out, the downtrodden... But here no one wants peace, here no one is dying of hunger, here is simply a bore. A well-fed, well-heated, drunken bore. It's not that the world is bad, it's just plain dreary. World without prospects, world without promise. But in the end man is not a carp, he still remains a man. Yes, it is no kingdom of shades, it is indeed the real existence, without detraction, without dreary confusion. Slug is moving on the world and the world will not mind subjecting itself to it.

Suddenly, for a fraction of a moment, I felt that I was lost. And it was cozy to be destroyed. Fortunately I grew angry. Splashing out water, I climbed out of the bath, cursing and stoking my ire, pulled my shorts and shirt over my wet body, and grabbed my watch. It was three o'clock, and it could have been three in the afternoon or three the following morning or three o'clock after a hundred years. Idiot, I thought, pulling on my trousers. Softened up and let Buba go when he was ready to give me the address of the gangsters' den. The operatives could have been there by now and we could have nabbed the whole accursed nest, the vile nest. The vermin nest.

The repulsive cloaca... And at this instant against the very depth of my consciousness, like a dancing spot of light, flicked a very calm thought. But I could not fasten upon it.

I located some Potomac in the medicine cabinet, the strongest stimulant which I could find in it. I started into the living room, but the youngsters were snoring away there, so I climbed out the window. The city was resting, of course.

Guffawing louts hung around under the street lamp on Waterway, bawling crowds surged on the brightly lit avenues. Somewhere songs were shouted, somewhere they were yelling "Shivers!"

Somewhere gla.s.s was being broken. I picked out a chauffeurless taxi, found the index for Sunshine Street, and dialed it on the control console. The car took off across town. The cab smelled sour and bottles rolled underfoot. At one intersection it almost plowed into a daisy chain of howling humanity, and at another there was the rhythmic flashing of colored lights -- apparently it was possible to set up the shivers elsewhere than the plaza. They were resting, resting with all their might, these benevolent patrons from the Happy Mood Salons, these polite customs inspectors, clever barbers, tender mothers and manly fathers, innocent youths and maidens -- they all exchanged their diurnal aspects for the nocturnal, they all worked hard to have fun and so that it wouldn't be necessary to think about a thing....

The taxi braked. It was the very same place. It even seemed as though there was that same burning smell...

... Peck registered a hit on the armored carrier with the Fulminator. It spun on a single tread, hopping in the piles of broken bricks, and two fascists immediately jumped out in their unb.u.t.toned camouflage shirts, flung a grenade apiece in our direction, and sped off into the darkness. They moved knowingly and adeptly, and it was obvious that these were not youngsters from the Royal Academy or lifers from the Golden Brigade, but genuine full-blown tank corps officers. Robert cut them down point-blank with a burst from his machine gun. The carrier was bulging with cases of beer. It struck us that we had been constantly thirsty for the last two days. Iowa Smith clambered into the carrier and began handing out the cans. Peck opened them with a knife. Robert, putting the machine gun against the carrier, punched holes into the cans with a sharp point on the armor. And the Teacher, adjusting his pince-nez, tripped on the Fulminator straps and muttered, "Wait a minute, Smith; can't you see I've got my hands full?" A five-story building burned briskly at the end of the street, there was a thick smell of smoke and hot metal, and we avidly downed the warm beer, and were drenched through and through, and it was very hot and the dead officers lay on the broken and crushed bricks, with their legs identically flung out in their black pants, and the camouflage shirts bunched at their necks, and the skin still glistening with perspiration on their backs.

'They are officers," said the Teacher. "Thank G.o.d. I can't bear the sight of any more dead kids. Accursed politics! People forget G.o.d on account of it."

"What G.o.d is that?" inquired Iowa Smith out of the carrier. "I've never heard of him."

"Don't jest about that, Smith," said the Teacher. "This will all end soon, and from then on no one nowhere will be permitted to poison the souls of men with vanity."

"And how then shall they multiply?" asked Iowa Smith. He bent over the beer again, and we could see the burn holes in his pants.

"I am talking about politics," said the Teacher modestly.

"The fascists must be destroyed. They are beasts. But that is not enough. There are many other political parties, and there is no place for them and all their propaganda in our land." The Teacher came from this town and lived within two blocks of our post. "Social anarchists, technocrats, communists, are of course -- "

"I am a communist," announced Iowa Smith, "at least by conviction. I am for the commune."

The Teacher looked at him in bewilderment.

"Also I am a G.o.dless man," added Iowa Smith. "There is no G.o.d, Teacher, and there's nothing you can do about it."

At which point we all began to say that we were all atheists, and Peck said that on top of that he was for technocracy, while Robert announced that his father was a social anarchist and his grandfather was a social anarchist and he, Robert, probably could not escape being a social anarchist, although he didn't know what it was all about.

"Well now, if the beer would get ice-cold, said Peck pensively, "I would at once believe in G.o.d with great delight."

Teacher smiled embarra.s.sedly and kept wiping his gla.s.ses.

He was a good man and we always kidded him, but he never took offense. From the very first night I observed that his courage was not great, but he never retreated without being commanded.

We were still chattering and joking when there was a thunderous crash, the burning building wall collapsed, and straight out of the swirling flames and clouds of smoke and sparks swam a Mammoth attack tank, floating a yard above the pavement. This was a new horror, the likes of which we hadn't seen yet.

Floating out in the middle of the street, it rotated its thrower as though looking around, and then, hovering on its air cushion, began to move in our direction, screeching and clanking metallically. I regained my wits only by the time I was behind a gate post. The tank was now considerably closer, and at first I couldn't see anyone at all, but then Iowa Smith stood up in full view out of the carrier, and propping the b.u.t.t of the Fulminator against his stomach, took aim. I could see the recoil double him up. I saw a bright flash against the black brow of the tank. And then the street was filled with roar and flame, and when I raised my burned eyelids with great effort, the street was empty and contained only the tank. There was no carrier, no mounds of broken brick, no leaning kiosk by the neighboring house -- there was only the tank. It was as though the monster had come awake and was spewing waterfalls of flame and the street ceased being a street and became a square.

Peck slapped me hard on the neck and I could see his gla.s.sy eyes right in front of my face, but there was no time to run toward the trench and break out the launcher.

We both picked up the mine and started running toward the tank, and all I remember is looking continually at the back of his head, and gasping for breath and counting steps, when the helmet flew off Peck's head, and he fell, so I almost dropped the mine and fell on top of him. The tank was blown up by Robert and Teacher. I still don't know how they did it or when; it must be they were running behind us with another mine. I sat until morning in the middle of the street holding Peck's bandaged head on my knees and staring at the awesome treads of the tank sticking out of the asphalt lake. That same morning the whole b.l.o.o.d.y thing came to an end all at once. Zun Padana surrendered with all his staff and was shot in the street by some crazed woman when already a prisoner....

This was the very same place. I even thought I smelled smoke and burned metal. Even the kiosk stood on the corner, and it too was a bit crooked in the latest style of architecture.

The part of the street which the tank turned into a plaza remained a plaza, and on the site of the asphalt lake there was a small square in which someone was being beaten. Iowa Smith was an urban planner from Iowa, U.S.A., Robert Sventisky was a movie director form Krakow, Poland. The Teacher was a schoolteacher from this town. No one ever saw them again, even dead. And Peck was Peck, who had now become Buba Buba lived in the same sort of cottage as I, and its front door was open. I knocked, but no one responded and no one - came out to meet me. I entered the dark hall. The lights did not go on. The door to the right was locked, and I looked into the one on the left. In the living room a bearded man, in a jacket, but without pants, was sleeping on a tattered couch.

Someone's feet stuck out from under the overturned table. There was a smell of brandy, tobacco smoke, and of something else, cloyingly sweet, like in Aunt Vaina's room the other day. In the door to the study, I b.u.mped into a handsome florid woman, who was not in the slightest surprised to see me.

"Good evening," I said. Please excuse me, but does Buba live here?"

"Here," she said, examining me out of glistening oily-looking eyes.

"Can I see him?"

"And why not -- all you want."

"Where is he?"

"Funny man. Where would he be?" she laughed.

I could guess where, but said, "In the bedroom?"

"You are warm," she said.

"What do you mean -- warm?"

"What a dunce, and sober yet! Would you like a drink?"

"No," I said, angry. "Where is he? I need him right away."

"Your prospects are poor," she said gaily. "But search on, search on. As for me, I must go."

She patted me on the cheek and went out.

The study was empty. There was a large crystal vase on the table with some kind of reddish fluid in it. Everything smelled of that nauseatingly sweet odor. The bedroom was also empty; crumpled sheets and pillows were scattered about. I approached the bathroom door. The door was full of holes, obviously made by bullets shot from the inside, judging by their shape. I hesitated, then took hold of the handle. The door was locked.

I opened it with considerable difficulty. Buba lay in the bath up to his neck in greenish water; steam rose from its surface. The radio howled and wheezed on the edge of the tub. I stood and looked at Buba. At the erstwhile cosmonaut experimenter, Peck Xenai. At the once-upon-a-time supple and well-muscled fellow, who at eighteen left his warm city by the warm sea, and went into s.p.a.ce for the glory of man, and who at thirty returned to his country to fight the last of the fascists and to remain here forever. I was repelled to think that only an hour ago, I had looked like him. I touched his face and pulled his thin hair. He did not stir. Then I bent over him to let him sniff some Potomac, and suddenly saw that he was dead.

I knocked the radio off the edge of the tub and crushed it under heel. There was a pistol on the floor. But Peck had not shot himself; it must have been simply that someone interfered with him and he shot through the door in order to be left alone. I stuck my arms in the hot water, picked him up, and carried him to the bed. He lay there all limp and terrible, with eyes sunken under his brows. If only he were not my friend... if only he were not such a wonderful guy... if only he were not such an outstanding worker...

I called emergency aid on the phone and sat down beside Peck. I tried not to think of him. I tried to think about the business at hand. And I tried to be cold and harsh, because at the very bottom of my conscious mind, that flick of warm feeling, like a speck of light, flashed again, and this time I understood what the thought was.

By the time the doctor came, I knew what I was going to do. I would find Eli. I would pay any sum. Maybe I would beat him. If necessary, I would torture him. And he would tell me, whence this plague flows out upon the world. He would name names and addresses. He would tell me all. And we would find these men. We would locate and burn their secret laboratories, and as for themselves, we would ship them out so far that they would never return. Whoever they might be. We would catch them all, we would catch all who ever tried slug and isolate them, too. Whoever they were. Then I would demand that I, too, be isolated because I knew what slug was. Because I grasped what sort of thought I had, because I was socially dangerous, just as they all are. And all that would be only the beginning. The beginning of all beginnings, and ahead would remain that which was most important: to make it so that people would never, never, wish to know what slug was. Probably that would be outlandish. Probably many would say that it was too outlandish, too harsh, too stupid -- but we would still have to do it if we wanted mankind not to stop....

The doctor, an old gray man, put down his white case, leaned over Buba, looked him over, and said indifferently, "Hopeless."

"Call the police," I said.

Slowly he put away his instruments.

"There is no need of that whatsoever," he said. "There's no criminal content, here. It is a neurostimulator...."

"Yes, I know."

"There you are -- the second case this night. They just don't know when to stop."