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Definitely Maybe Arkady PRAISE FOR DEFINITELY MAYBE “One of the Strugatsky brothers is descended from Gogol and the other from Chekhov, but nobody is sure which is which. Together they have now proved quite denitely that a visit from a gorgeous blonde, from a disappearing midget, from your mother-in-law, and from the secret police, are all manifestations of a cosmic principle of homeostasis, maybe. This is denitely, not maybe, a beautiful book.” —URSULA K. LE GUIN “Surely one of the best and most provocative novels I have ever read, in or out of sci-.” —THEODORE STURGEON “Provocative, delicately paced and set against a rich physical and psychological background, this is one of the best novels of the year.” —CHICAGO SUN-TIMES PRAISE FOR ROADSIDE PICNIC “It’s a book with an extraordinary atmosphere—and a demonstration of how science ction, by using a single bold central metaphor, can open up the possibilities of the novel.” —HARI KUNZRU, THE GUARDIAN “Gritty and realistic but also fantastical, this is a novel you won’t easily put down—or forget.” —io9 “It has survived triumphantly as a classic.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY PRAISE FOR THE STRUGATSKY BROTHERS “The Strugatsky brothers demonstrate that they are realists of the fantastic inasmuch as realism in fantasy betokens a respect for logical consequence, an honesty in deducing all conclusions entirely from the assumed premises.” —STANISŁAW LEM “[In writing Gun, with Occasional Music], I fused the Chandler/Ross MacDonald voice with those rote dystopia moves that I knew backwards and forwards from my study of Ballard, Dick, Orwell, Huxley, and the Brothers Strugatsky.” —JONATHAN LETHEM “Successive generations of Russian intellectuals were raised on the Strugatskys. Their books can be read with a certain pair of spectacles on as political commentaries on Soviet society or indeed any repressive society.” —MUIREANN MAGUIRE, THE GUARDIAN “Their protagonists are often caught up in adventures not unlike those of pulp-ction heroes, but the story line typically veers o in unpredictable directions, and the intellectual puzzles that animate the plots are rarely resolved. Their writing has an untidiness that is nally provocative; they open windows in the mind and then fail to close them all, so that, putting down one of their books, you feel a cold breeze still lifting the hairs on the back of your neck.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES DEFINITELY MAYBE ARKADY (1925–1991) and BORIS (1933–2012) STRUGATSKY were the most acclaimed and beloved science ction writers of the Soviet era. The brothers were born and raised in Leningrad, the sons of a critic and a teacher. When the city was besieged by the Germans during World War II, Arkady and their father, Natan, were evacuated to the countryside. Boris remained in Leningrad with their mother throughout the war. Arkady was drafted into the Soviet army and studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, graduating in 1949 as an interpreter from English and Japanese. He served as an interpreter in the Far East before returning to Moscow in 1955. Boris studied astronomy at Leningrad State University, and worked as an astronomer and computer engineer. In the mid-1950s, the brothers began to write ction, and soon published their rst jointly written novel, From Beyond. They would go on to write twenty-ve novels together, including Roadside Picnic, which was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s lm Stalker; Snail on the Slope; Hard to Be a God; and Monday Begins on Saturday, as well as numerous short stories, essays, plays, and lm scripts. Their books have been translated into multiple languages and published in twenty-seven countries. After Arkady’s death in 1991, Boris continued writing, publishing two books under the name S. Vititsky. Boris died on November 19, 2012, at the age of seventy-nine. The asteroid 3054 Strugatskia, discovered in 1977, the year Denitely Maybe was rst published, is named after the brothers. ANTONINA W. BOUIS has translated many Russian writers, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Tatyana Tolstoya, Sergei Dovlatov, and Andrei Sakharov. THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may nd at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET DEFINITELY MAYBE Originally published under the title За мuллuapб лem бo кoнцa cвema [One Billion Years to the End of the World] Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Translation copyright © 1978 by Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Afterword copyright © 2013 by the Estates of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky Translation of the afterword copyright © 2013 by Antonina W. Bouis First Melville House printing: February 2014 Melville House Publishing 145 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY 11201 and 8 Blackstock Mews Islington London N4 2BT mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strugatskii, Arkadii, 1925–1991. [Za milliard let do kontsa sveta. English] Denitely maybe : a manuscript discovered under strange circumstances / Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky; translated by Antonia W. Bouis. pages cm ISBN 978-1-61219-281-9 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6 (ebook) I. Strugatskii, Boris, 1933–2012, author. II. Bouis, Antonina W., translator. III. Title. PG3476.S78835Z3213 2014 891.73′44—dc23 2013038567 Design by Christopher King v3.1 Contents Cover About the Author Title Page Copyright Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 A Note From the Translator An Afterword to Denitely Maybe CHAPTER 1 Excerpt 1.… the white July heat, the hottest it had been in two hundred years, engulfed the city. The air shimmered over red-hot rooftops. All the windows in the city were ung open, and in the thin shade of wilting trees, old women sweated and melted on benches near courtyard gates. The sun charged past the meridian and sank its claws into the long-suering bookbindings and the glass and polished wood of the bookcases; hot, angry patches of reected light quivered on the wallpaper. It was almost time for the afternoon siege, for the furious sun to hang dead still in the sky above the twelve-story house across the street and re endless rounds of heat into the apartment. Malianov closed the window—both frames—and drew the heavy yellow drapes. Then, hitching up his underpants, he padded over to the kitchen in his bare feet and opened the door to the balcony. It was just after two. On the kitchen table, among the bread crumbs, was a still life consisting of a frying pan with the dried-up remains of an omelet, an unnished glass of tea, and a gnawed end of bread smeared with oozing butter. “No one’s washed up and nothing is washed,” Malianov said to himself. The sink was overowing with unwashed dishes. They hadn’t been done in a long time. The oorboard squeaked, and Kaliam appeared out of nowhere, mad with the heat; he glanced up at Malianov with his green eyes and soundlessly opened and closed his mouth. Then, tail twitching, he proceeded to his dish under the oven. There was nothing on his dish except a few bare sh bones. “You’re hungry,” Malianov said unhappily. Kaliam immediately replied in a way that meant, well, yes, it wouldn’t hurt to have a little something. “You were fed this morning,” said Malianov, crouching in front of the refrigerator. “Or no, that’s not right. It was yesterday morning I fed you.” He took out Kaliam’s pot and looked into it—there were a couple of scraps and a sh n stuck to the side. There wasn’t even that much in the refrigerator itself. There was an empty box that used to have some Yantar cheese in it, a horrible-looking bottle with the dregs of ker, and a wine bottle lled with iced tea. In the vegetable bin, amid the onion skins, a wrinkled piece of cabbage the size of a st lay rotting and a sprouting potato languished in oblivion. Malianov looked into the freezer—a tiny piece of bacon on a plate had settled in for the winter among the mountains of frost. And that was it. Kaliam was purring and rubbing his whiskers on Malianov’s bare knee. Malianov shut the refrigerator and stood up. “It’s all right,” he told Kaliam. “Everything’s closed for lunch now, anyway.” Of course, he could go over to Moscow Boulevard, where the break was from one to two. But there were always lines there, and it was too far to go in this heat. And then, what a crummy integral that turned out to be! Well, all right, let that be the constant … it doesn’t depend on omega. It’s clear that it doesn’t. It follows from the most general considerations that it doesn’t. Malianov imagined the sphere and pictured the integration traveling over the entire surface. Out of nowhere Zhukovsky’s formula popped into his mind. Just like that. Malianov chased it away, but it came back.
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