CHAPTER 10

THE HOTEL IN URGENSKY, the provincial town where Nikolai Levin was living, was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels.

There remained only one filthy room, which would barely fit the two of them, and their robots, once revivified. Levin was feeling angry with his wife because what he had expected had come to pass: at the moment of arrival, when his heart throbbed with emotion and anxiety to find his brother and make whatever arrangements were necessary to find a place where the Class Ills could stay here undetected, he had to be seeing after her.

“Go, do go!” she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.

He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over his brother’s consort, Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go in to see him. She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow; the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.

Speaking rapidly and with obvious apprehension, Marya Nikolaevna expressed her relief at seeing him: Nikolai’s illness, she explained, had dramatically worsened, and indeed she feared he was now at death’s door.

“What? Well, and how is he at present?”

“Very bad. He can’t get up. His body writhes with pain, and there is in the texture of his flesh a strange and unseemly rippling. I fear the worst. Come,” Marya Nikolaevna continued. “He has kept expecting you.”

The door of his room opened and Kitty peeped out. Tatiana’s head peeped out just under hers. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say or what to do.

For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.

“Well! Have you explained to her our plan, regarding the Class III robots?” she turned to her husband and then to her.

“But one can’t go on talking in the corridor like this!” Levin said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though going about his affairs. Could this be one of them? A Toy Soldier? Some other agent of the state, disguised in everyday clothes?

“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, she added, “or go on; go, and then come for me,” and she and Tatiana went back into the room.

Levin went to his brother’s room. There he was aghast to see the instructions etched above the door, but he obeyed them nonetheless, donning the elaborate sickroom costume of mask, gown, and gloves.

“My poor brother,” he murmured to Socrates, who was donning his own mask; of course a companion robot required no protection from human infection, but the costume would at least delay his immediate detection as a machine-man, should a doctor or other stranger happen into the room.

Levin, from Marya’s descriptions, had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked—greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things. He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree.

In this little, dirty room with the caution posted by the door, with the painted panels of its walls filthy with spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay, covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm, smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and the tense, transparent-looking forehead.

Propped against the opposite wall was Karnak, Nikolai’s staggering rust-bucket of a Class III, if anything more decrepit and dilapidated than the last time Levin had seen him. “One can see why the Ministry has no interest in adjusting such machines,” whispered Levin to Socrates, who had instinctively recoiled from the sad, shrunken metal figure.

As they approached the bed, any doubt that this wracked figure was Levin’s dear brother became impossible. In spite of the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to glance at those eager eyes raised at his approach, only to catch the faint movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache, to realize the terrible truth that this death-like body was his living brother.

When Konstantin took him by the hand, the thick, white protective gloves feeling scarcely protection enough, Nikolai smiled. There was at that moment the scrape of a boot heel in the hallway outside, and Levin looked up sharply: was it them? Had they been found already? Socrates pulled his mask higher over his face, his eyebank flashing unsteadily.

“You did not expect to find me like this,” Nikolai articulated with effort.

“Yes . . . no,” said Levin. The sound of the footsteps faded down the hallway.

A great swell of flesh bubbled up from Nikolai’s midsection, as if his body was a balloon and air had been temporarily forced into one part of it. Levin looked away, as Nikolai winced and groaned.

“How was it you didn’t let me know before that you were suffering so?”

Nikolai could not answer; again the flesh of his torso bubbled grotesquely, and again he gritted his teeth and scowled with evident agony.

Levin had to talk so as not to be silent, and he did not know what to say, especially as his brother made no reply. His odd condition was not, it appeared, contained to his midsection; as Levin watched, one of Nikolai’s eyes bulged grotesquely, and then the other. He tried to speak and his swollen tongue lolled like bread dough onto his cheek. Containing his horror and revulsion, Levin said to his brother that his wife had come with him. When his tongue detumesced and he could speak again, Nikolai expressed pleasure, but said he was afraid of frightening her by his condition. A silence followed—Levin would not say so, but he had precisely the same fear.

“Let me explain the reason we have come,” Levin then said. “It has to do with . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper, drawing nearer his brother’s wrecked flesh, and said, “the robots.”

Karnak’s leg fell off, and he fell to the ground with a scrape and clank. Socrates, politely, lifted the other machine back up and placed him in his previous position against the wall.

Suddenly Nikolai stirred, and began to say something, entirely ignoring Levin’s whispered comment about the Class Ills and speaking instead of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor with a II/Prognosis/4 or higher. Levin saw that he still hoped.

Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to escape, if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said that he would go and fetch his wife.

“Very well, and I’ll tell Karnak to tidy up here. It’s dirty and stinking here, I expect. Karnak! Clear up the room,” the sick man said with effort. Karnak swiveled his head unit uncertainly, his aural sensors detecting some distant sensory input.

“Well, how is he?” Kitty asked with a frightened face when Levin went to fetch her.

“Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! What did you come for?” said Levin.

Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands.

“Kostya! Take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.

Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again to his brother with Kitty.

Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty donned the mask and gloves and gown, went into the sickroom, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh, young, thickly gloved hand, the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.

“We have met, though we were not acquainted, on the Venus orbiter,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”

“Would you have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.

“Yes, I would. I am sorry to have found you unwell, and I hope I can be of some use to you.”

“And I to you, and to your machines.” Nikolai smiled, and from this quiet statement Levin gathered that his brother had indeed heard his allusion to the robots, and was willing despite his grave health to help keep their beloved-companions safe.

It was decided that when the time came for Levin and Kitty to return to Pokrovskoe (meaning, though none spoke the words aloud, when Nikolai had passed into the Beyond), their Class Ills would stay here, their exterior trim radically downgraded, masquerading as Class IIs at work in a local cigarette factory—the owner of which, Nikolai felt sure, would accept a small payment to hide the robots among his workforce—and spending their Surceased nights in the dingy factory basement.