Perhaps I shouldn't take you then? thought Kandid. You've been there already, the forest has chewed you over, and who knows, maybe you've already rolled on the ground yelling with pain and fear with a young girl standing over you, biting her delicious lip, her childish littie palms outspread. I don't know, don't know. But I've got to go. Grab one at least, two at least, find everything out, sort every last bit out... After that? Doomed, doomed and wretched. Or rather - happy and doomed, since they don't know they're doomed, that the mighty of their world see in them only a dirty tribe of ravishers, that the mighty have already aimed at them clouds of controlled viruses, columns of robots, the very forest itself, that for them everything is preordained and - worst of all - that historical truth here, in the forest, is not on their side, they are relics, condemned to destruction by objective laws, and to assist them means to go against progress, to delay progress on some tiny sector of the front. Only that doesn't interest me, thought Kandid. What has their progress to do with me, it's not my progress and I call it progress only because there's no other suitable word... Here the head doesn't choose. The heart chooses. Natural laws are neither good nor bad, they're outside morality. But I'm not! If those Maidens had picked me up, cured me and showed me kindness, accepted me as one of themselves, taken pity on me - well, then, I would probably have taken the side of this progress easily and naturally, and Hopalong and all these villages would have been for me an exasperating survival, taking up too much effort for too long... But perhaps not, perhaps it wouldn't have been simple and easy, I can't stand it when people are regarded as animals. But perhaps it's a matter of terminology, and if I'd learned the women's language, everything would have sounded different to me: enemies of progress, gluttonous stupid idlers... Ideals... Great aims... Natural laws... And for the sake of this annihilate half the inhabitants! No, that's not for me. In any language, that's not for me. What do I care if Hopalong is a pebble in the millstones of their progress? And if I ever manage to reach the biostation, which I probably won't, I'll do everything I can to stop those millstones. Anyway, if I reach the biostation... M - yes. It's odd, it's never occurred to me before to look at the Directorate from the side. And Hopalong never dreams of looking at the forest from the side. Nor do those Maidens, either, probably. And it's really a curious spectacle - the Directorate, seen from above. All right, I'll have a think about that later.
"We're agreed, then," he said. "We leave day after tomorrow."
"Surely," replied Hopalong at once. "Sharp left from me..."
A sudden hubbub was heard from the field. Women began shrieking. A great many voices began shouting out in unison:
"Dummy! Dummy! Hey, Dummy!"
Hopalong roused himself.
"Doubtless deadlines!" said he, rising hastily. "Come on, Dummy, don't sit there, I want to watch."
Kandid got up, drew the scalpel from his blouse, and strode off to the outskirts of the village.
