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