The habitations fell away. People were wandering around over open country, lit by the moon. It looked as if they were playing blind-man's buff as they went about on bent legs with their arms spread wide. Everybody was blindfolded. One of them went full tilt into a post and probably uttered a cry of pain, for the others at once halted and cautiously began turning their heads.
"Every year the same game," Voldemar was saying. "They've got photoelements and acoustics of all sorts, cybernetics and layabout guards stuck up on every corner - all the same, every year one of their little machines gets away. Then they tell you: drop everything and go and look for it. Who wants to do that? Who wants to get involved, I ask you? If you just catch sight of it out of the corner of your eye - that's it. Either you get drafted into the engineers or they send you off into the forest somewhere, to the advance base to pickle mushrooms so's you can't talk about what you've seen, for God's sake. That's why the people get around it as best they can. Some of them blindfold themselves so's not to see what's going on. , ... The brighter boys just run around and shout as loud as they can. They ask people for documents, search people or just get up on the roof and howl as if they're taking part, no risk involved..."
"What about us, are we trying to catch anything?" Pepper asked.
"I'll say we are. The public here are out hunting and we're the same as everybody else. Six hours by the clock we'll be on the hunt. There's a directive: if in the course of six hours the runaway mechanism is not detected, it's blown up by remote control. So everything can stay hush-hush. Else it might fall into unauthorized hands. You saw what a mess-up there was in the Directorate? Well, that's heavenly peace - you see what it'll be like in six hours time. See, nobody knows where the machine's got to. It might be in your pocket. And the charge they use is pretty powerful, just to make sure. Last year, for example, the machine turned up in a bathhouse, and there were plenty of people packed in there - for safety. They think a bathhouse is a damp sort of place, out of the way... Well I was there as well. A bathhouse, that's the place, thinks I... So I was blown out of the window, nice and smooth like being on a wave. I hadn't time to blink before I was sitting in a snowdrift, burning beams flying by overhead..."
The land around was flat sickly grass, fitful moonlight, a tired white road. On the left stood the Directorate where lights were racing madly about again.
"What I don't understand," said Pepper, "is how we're going to lay hands on it. We don't even know what it is ... big or small dark or light-colored."
"That you'll see soon enough," Voldemar assured him. "That I'll show you in five minutes. How the clever lads do their hunting. Hell, where's that place... Lost it. Went left, didn't I? Aha, left... Yonder's the machine-depot, we need to be right of that."
The truck veered off the road and went bumping over the hummocks. The storage area was on the left - rows of enormous pale containers, like a dead city on the plain.
... Probably couldn't stand it. It was tested on the vibrostand; they set their minds to tormenting it, dug about in its innards, burned the subtle nerves with soldering-irons, it suffocating from the smell of rosin. They made it do stupid things, they created it to do stupid things, they went on perfecting it to perform stupider things, and in the evenings they left it, tortured, drained of strength in a hot dry cubicle. Finally it decided to go, although it knew everything - the pointlessness of flight, and its own doom. And it went, carrying within itself a self-destruct charge, and is now standing somewhere in the shadows. Softly picking about with its jointed legs, and watching, and listening and waiting... And now it understands with absolute clarity what before it only guessed at: that there is no freedom, whether doors are open before you or not, that everything is stupidity and chaos, there is loneliness alone...
"Ah!" said Voldemar, pleased. "There she is, the little beauty..."
Pepper opened his eyes but all he saw was a black pond of considerable extent, a swamp in fact. The engine roared, a wave of filth rose and crashed onto the windshield. The engine managed another crazy howl and died. It was very quiet.
"Now that's more like it," said Voldemar. "All six wheels spinning like the soap in a bathtub." He stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray and opened his door a little. "There's somebody else out here," he said, then a shout. "Ho, mate! How's it going?"
"Okay!" from somewhere outside.
"Caught it yet?"
"All I've caught is a cold!" from outside. "And five tadpoles."
Voldemar firmly shut his door, and switched on the light; he glanced at Pepper, gave him a wink, retrieved a mandolin from under the seat and commenced to pluck the strings, his head tucked into his right shoulder.
