Vadim stopped listening to him. Bashkalo noticed this immediately.
– So you're a brave one, right? – he said over the gunsight. – Well, come on, come on, come on, go ahead… you sensitive leather stocking. Bring me some prehistorical loots, my two-legged cat. Some flowers. Dinosaurs. And will see, what we shall do with you later. But if you don't get out, then you don't. A grenade after you. You don't know, right? Exactly “procrustes” explode very well. How do you think we made it almost halfway to the airfield? So many of these tough places were there… Stand down, – he said to himself. – Come on, Sverzhin. Farewell.
Vadim turned away, looking at the hole, that means looking at the steppe, framed with a smoke frame. “Slowly, try it with your hand first”, timidly suggested Mumbler, who became serious. Vadim shook his head. No. He rummaged around the belt, pulled out another strip of gauze from the clamp.
– Hey, hey, warrior, no jokes!.. – proclaimed Bashkalo expressively.
Vadim showed him the gauze over the shoulder. Bashkalo went silent. Vadim tied several knots at one of the ends, one above the other, put the formed ball in his mouth and began drooling on it. The wet ball weighted the strip rather well for something homemade, making the “risk” manageable, but without a sinker, without a nut. For some reason here and now it seemed important to be iron-free. (The thought about the first one who ran through the second railcar flashed again.) Keeping the “risk” in his outstretched hand, Vadim began to swing it forward and backward. Here the ball touched the hole, like the surface of a vertical puddle, no waves ran, but the gauze immediately stretched out. Vadim unclasped his fingers and the hole sucked it in. And Vadim, without a farewell sigh, bent and stepped after it. And disappeared.
Having waited a moment, ensign Bashkalo licked the mustache, sticky with blood, lowered the barrel of the machine gun and said into space:
– And what now, bitch? Is that all, bitch?
Meanwhile, two hundred million years ago Vadim was smothered by an enormous sun, by overwhelming heavy, damp odors, making his knees weak, knocking him down and tossing at the same time. And he fell with his eyes shut, not painfully but heavily on the left side and left shoulder, as if somebody had snatched him back and thrown him to the left. He knew for sure that he had already fallen, struck the ground, but inside everything continued to fly, to churn, howling with cold in the lower abdomen… and a huge wet rough palm grabbed him in that place between the ears, where the balance control center of the brain is located, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it to another huge wet rough palm. And back. And