Listen, books, do you know there are more of you than there are people? If all the people were to disappear, you could populate the earth and supply their place. You've got good and honest among you, wise and erudite, frivolous rattles, sceptics and madmen, murderers, corrupters of children, children, prophets of doom, complacent fools, and hoarse demagogues with flaming eyes. You wouldn't know why you were here either. Why are you here, anyway? A lot of you give knowledge but what use is it in the forest? It has no connection with the forest. It's like drilling the principles of fortification into a future builder of sun cities, and then no matter how he tried to build sanatoria or stadia, he kept producing gloomy redoubts complete with bastions, scarps, and counterscarps. All you've given to people coming to the forest is prejudice, not knowledge... Others of you instill mistrust and depression. And that's not because they're miserable or cruel or suggest hope be abandoned, but because they lie. Occasionally they lie radiantly, accompanied by rousing songs and jaunty whistling, sometimes maudlin, moaning, and defensive, but - they lie. For some reason nobody ever burns books like that and never removes them from libraries, never has there been a case in human history where a lie has been given to the flames, unless people chanced not to understand it, or indeed believed in it. In the forest they're not needed either. They're never needed. Probably that's why there are so many of them ... or rather it's because people like them. "Dearer to us than the bitter truth..." What? who's that talking there... Oh, it's me ... as I was saying, there are other books... What? ...
"Quiet. Let him sleep." "Why sleep. Better have a drink." "Stop scraping about like that... Here, it's old Pepper!"
"What if it is, watch you don't fall." "He's sort of unlooked-after, he's pathetic!" "I'm not pathetic," mumbled Pepper as he woke up. A library stepladder stood opposite Pepper. On its top step sat Alevtina from the photo laboratory, while below, driver Acey was holding the steps with his tattooed arms and gazing upward. "He's always wandering about like a lost soul," said Alevtina, looking at Pepper. "No supper, likely. He wants waking up, a glass of vodka at least. What do people like that dream about, I wonder?"
"Ask me what I'm seeing awake!" said Acey gazing up.
"Anything new?" asked Alevtina. "Never seen it before?"
"Well, no," said Acey. "Can't say it's especially new, but it's like the movies - you see it twenty times over but it's still nice."
On the third step from the bottom lay pieces of a massive strudel, on the fourth were laid out cucumbers and peeled oranges, a half-empty bottle and a plastic pencil-cup stood on the fifth step.
"Look as much as you like as long as you keep the steps steady," said Alevtina, and she set to work getting weighty journals and faded folders down from the top shelves of the stack. She blew the dust off and frowned as she flipped the pages; she put some to one side and replaced the rest. Driver Acey snuffled loudly.
"Do you need the year's before last?" asked Alevtina.
"There's only one thing I want just now," said Acey mysteriously. "I'll just wake Pepper up."
"Keep near the steps," said Alevtina.
"I'm not asleep," said Pepper. "I've been watching you for ages."
"You can't see anything from there," said Acey. "Come over here, Monsieur Pepper. We've got the lot here, women, wine, fruit..."
Pepper got up, stumbling on one numb leg, and came uo to the steps; he poured himself a drink. "What did you dream about, Peppy?" inquired Alevtina from aloft.
Pepper glanced up mechanically and averted his eyes at once.
"What I dreamed ... rubbish... I was talking to the books."
He drained the drink and took a piece of orange. "Just a minute there. Monsieur Pepper," said Acey. "I'll have a drink myself."
"So do you want the year before last's?" "I'll say!" said Acey, splashing into his glass and choosing a cucumber. "And for the one before that. I always need it. I've always had it and can't do without it. Nobody can. Some need more, some less ... I always say, why lecture me? What I am, I am." Acey tossed down his drink with the greatest of pleasure and crunched into a cucumber. "But you can't live the way I live here. I'll put up with it just a little bit more and then I'll drive my truck into the forest and catch myself a mermaid..."
