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

Directorate building via the service entrance. It was cold and dark in the
corridors, which reeked of tobacco, dust, and old papers. There wasn't a
soul anyway, no sound could be heard from behind the leatherette doors.
Pepper went up to the second floor by way of a narrow staircase without a
handrail, clinging to the dilapidated wall. He went up to a door above which
a sign flickered on and off. "Wash your hands before work." A large black
letter M showed up on the door. Pepper thrust at the door and experienced a
slight shock on discovering it was his own office. That is, of course, it
wasn't his office; it was Kirn's, chief of Science Security, but Pepper had
put a table in there and now it stood sideways near the door by the tiled
wall; half the table was, as usual, taken up with a mothballed Mercedes.
Kirn's table stood by the large, well-cleaned window; he was already at
work, sitting hunched-up and consulting a slide rule.
"I wanted to wash my hands," said Pepper, at a loss.
"Wash away, wash away," Kim nodded. "There's the washbasin. It's going
to be very convenient. Now everybody will be coming to see us."
Pepper went over to the basin and began washing his hands. He washed
them in hot and cold water, two kinds of soap, and special grease-absorbent
paste, rubbed them with a bast whisp and brushes of varying degrees of
stiffness. After that he switched the electric dryer on and for some time
held his moist pink hands in the howling stream of warm air.
"They announced at four that they were transferring us to the second
floor," said Kim. "Whereabouts were you? With Alevtina?"
"No, I was at the cliff-edge," said Pepper, seating himself at his
table.
The door opened wide and Proconsul entered the room with a rush, waved
his briefcase in greeting, and disappeared behind the curtain. The door of
his study creaked and the bolt shot home. Pepper took the sheet off the
Mercedes, sat without moving, then went over to the window and flung it
open.
The forest wasn't visible from here, but it was there. It always was
there, though it could only be seen from the cliff. Anywhere else in the
Directorate something was in the way. In the way were the cream structures
of the mechanical workshops and the four-story garage for staff cars. In the
way were the cattle-yards of the farm area and the washing hung out near the
laundry with its spin dryer permanently out of commission. In the way was
the park with its flowerbeds and pavilions, its big-wheel and
plaster-of-paris bathers, covered with penciled grafitti. In the way stood
cottages with ivy-draped verandahs adorned with the crosses of television
antennae. From here, however, the first-floor window, the forest was hidden
by a high brick wall, incomplete as yet, but very high, which rose around
the flat-roofed one-story Engineering Penetration building. The forest could
only be seen from the cliff-edge.
However, even a man who had never seen the forest, heard nothing about
it, never thought about it, wasn't afraid of it, and never yearned for it,
even such a man could easily have guessed at its existence if only because
of the simple existence of the Directorate. I, for example, have thought
about the forest, argued about it, dreamed about it, but I never even
suspected its actual existence. I became convinced of its existence not when
I first went out onto the cliff-edge, but when I first read the notice near